Abstract
In the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), customer demands from one or more depots are to be distributed via a fleet of vehicles. Various objectives of the problem are considered in literature, including minimization of the total distance/time traversed by the fleet during distribution, the total cost of vehicle usage, or minimizing the maximum tour length/time. In this study, we consider a multi-compartment VRP with incompatible products for the daily solution of a livestock feed distribution network, where each livestock farm requests one type of feed from a single depot, and the vehicles have several compartments. The objective is to minimize the total cost of distribution. Although VRP is a well-studied problem in literature, multi-compartment VRP is considered only by few authors, and our problem differs from the existing ones due to special operational constraints imposed by the situation on hand. We formulate a basic mathematical model for the problem and present possible extensions. We design a computational experiment for testing the effects of uncontrollable parameters over model performance on a commercial solver and report the results. The proposed model can easily be adapted to other distribution networks such as food and fuel/chemicals.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Avella, P., Boccia, M., Sforza, A.: Solving a fuel delivery problem by heuristic and exact approaches. Eur. J. Op. Res. 152(1), 170–179 (2004)
Dantzig, G.B., Ramser, J.H.: The truck dispatching problem. Manag. Sci. 6(1), 80–91 (1959)
Derigs, U., Gottlieb, J., Kalkoff, J., Piesche, M., Rothlauf, F., Vogel, U.: Vehicle routing with compartments: applications, modelling and heuristics. OR Spectr. 33(4), 885–914 (2011)
El Fallahi, A., Prins, C., Wolfler, C.: A memetic algorithm and a tabu search for the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem. Comput. Op. Res. 35(5), 1725–1741 (2008)
Henke, T., Speranza, M.G., Wascher, G.: The multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with flexible compartment sizes. Eur. J. Op. Res. 246, 730–743 (2015)
Lenstra, J., Rinnooy Kan, A.: Complexity of vehicle routing and scheduling problems. Networks 11(2), 221–227 (1981)
Suprayogi, Setiawan Komara S., Yamato H.: A local search technique for solving a delivery problem of fuel products. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management, pp. 18–20 (2007)
Van der Bruggen, L., Gruson, R., Salomon, M.: Reconsidering the distribution structure of gasoline products for a large oil company. Eur. J. Op. Res. 81(3), 460–473 (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kandiller, L., Eliiyi, D.T., Taşar, B. (2017). A Multi-compartment Vehicle Routing Problem for Livestock Feed Distribution. In: Dörner, K., Ljubic, I., Pflug, G., Tragler, G. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2015. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42902-1_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42902-1_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-42901-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-42902-1
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)