EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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3993. Vehicle Routing With Stochastic Demand, Service and Waiting Times – The Case of Food Bank Collection Problems

Invited abstract in session MD-64: Vehicle Routing Under Uncertainty 1, stream VeRoLog - Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: S16 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Sonja Rohmer
HEC Montréal
2. Meike Reusken
Tilburg University
3. Gilbert Laporte
HEC Montreal
4. Frans Cruijssen
Tilburg University

Abstract

Food banks play an important role in fighting food waste as well as alleviating hunger, yet often struggle to effectively collect all food donations due to their highly uncertain operating environment. Addressing this issue, this research introduces the capacitated vehicle routing problem with travel time restrictions and stochastic demand, service and waiting times, which can be generalized to other routing applications. The problem aims to determine a minimum number of vehicles, while cost-effectively planning routes for these vehicles so that each route violates the vehicle capacity and the travel time limit only with a very small probability. The resulting problem is highly complex and thus solved by means of a matheuristic, which decomposes the problem into its natural decision components. As such, it first determines the number of districts into which the service area should be partitioned, before allocating each customer to exactly one district and then plans a route for each district. Extensive numerical experiments, involving both randomly generated and real-life instances, demonstrate the matheuristic’s effectiveness in
solving instances with up to 100 customers. In addition, we present valuable managerial insights by applying our matheuristic to real-life instances from Dutch and Canadian food banks.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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