A rich vehicle routing problem dealing with perishable food: a case study

Pedro Amorim (), Sophie Parragh, Fabrício Sperandio and Bernardo Almada-Lobo

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, 2014, vol. 22, issue 2, 489-508

Abstract: This paper presents a successful application of operations research techniques in guiding the decision making process to achieve a superior operational efficiency in core activities. We focus on a rich vehicle routing problem faced by a Portuguese food distribution company on a daily basis. This problem can be described as a heterogeneous fleet site dependent vehicle routing problem with multiple time windows. We use the adaptative large neighbourhood search framework, which has proven to be effective to solve a variety of different vehicle routing problems. Our plans are compared against those of the company and the impact that the proposed decision support tool may have in terms of cost savings is shown. The algorithm converges quickly giving the planner considerably more time to focus on value-added tasks, rather than manually correct the routing schedule. Moreover, contrarily to the necessary adaptation time of the planner, the tool is quite flexible in following market changes, such as the introduction of new customers or new products. Copyright Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa 2014

Keywords: Vehicle routing problem; Adaptative large neighbourhood search; OR in industry; Decision support systems; 90C11; 90C27; 90B06 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11750-012-0266-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:topjnl:v:22:y:2014:i:2:p:489-508

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.de/orders.htm

DOI: 10.1007/s11750-012-0266-4

Access Statistics for this article

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research is currently edited by Juan José Salazar González and Gustavo Bergantiños

More articles in TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research from Springer, Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().