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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42902-1_20
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