Description
In this work we deal with a real-world inspired periodic vehicle routing problem with intermediate facilities (PVRPIF) arising in the field of solid waste collection in urban areas. The waste is collected with a fleet of vehicles located at a central depot and delivered to incinerators. Trips to these intermediate facilities must be scheduled mid-route, when necessary, and at the end of the route, so that the vehicles return to the depot empty. Since most locations do not have to be visited every day, a planning horizon of several days is considered.Based on the real-world handling, in periodic routing problems one typically selects a visit schedule from a given set of possible alternatives. These sets contain schedule variations with a fixed number of visits per location and the number of alternatives is usually small. In our work, we investigate the value of flexibility by modifying the schedules to varying extent using a set of real-world-inspired instances. We study the effects of different visit frequencies and more flexible schedules on the vehicle routes, with the goal of keeping the routes as short as possible, collecting the total amount of waste generated and avoiding overflowing bins. Additionally, we consider flexibility in the number of intermediate facilities and their assignment to vehicle routes while observing capacity constraints and minimum quotas.
We implement an adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm (ALNS) to solve the PVRPIF and show its effectiveness on a set of small benchmark instances from the literature. The method uses several problem-specific operators to adapt visit frequencies and schedules, and a heuristic procedure to insert the intermediate facilities. We solve realistic and real-world instances with up to several thousand collection locations.
| Period | 13 Jul 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | IFORS 2023,The 23rd Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies: Advanced Analytics for a Better World |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Santiago de Chile, ChileShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |