The multi-period service territory design problem – An introduction, a model and a heuristic approach

Matthias Bender, Anne Meyer, Jörg Kalcsics and Stefan Nickel

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2016, vol. 96, issue C, 135-157

Abstract: In service territory design applications, a field service workforce is responsible for providing recurring services at their customers’ sites. We introduce the associated planning problem, which consists of two subproblems: In the partitioning subproblem, customers must be grouped into service territories. In the scheduling subproblem, customer visits must be scheduled throughout the multi-period planning horizon. The emphasis of this paper is put on the scheduling subproblem. We propose a mixed integer programming model for this subproblem and present a location-allocation heuristic. The results of extensive experiments on real-world instances show that the proposed heuristic produces high-quality solutions.

Keywords: Territory design; Multi-period planning horizon; Mixed integer linear programming; Location-allocation heuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2016.09.007

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