Title: A discrete-event driven metaheuristic for dynamic home service routing with synchronised trip sharing

Authors: Christian Fikar; Angel A. Juan; Enoc Martinez; Patrick Hirsch

Addresses: Institute of Production and Logistics, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Feistmantelstrasse 4, 1180 Wien, Austria ' Department of Computer Science, Open University of Catalonia – IN3, Rambla Poblenou 156, 08018 Barcelona, Spain ' Department of Computer Science, Open University of Catalonia – IN3, Rambla Poblenou 156, 08018 Barcelona, Spain ' Institute of Production and Logistics, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Feistmantelstrasse 4, 1180 Wien, Austria

Abstract: It is common practice in the home service industry that each staff member operates a separate vehicle to visit customers. Facilitating trip sharing and walking policies allows reducing the number of required vehicles, however, often does not succeed due to operational difficulties in routing and planning. In particular, coordinating arrival times of staff members and vehicles at pickup locations introduces major complexity. Previous work in this field focusses on static problem settings where all data is known in advance. Real world-operations, however, are dynamic as cancellations or new requests can happen at any time. This requires decisions to be made in real-time. To assist planners, we propose a flexible discrete-event driven metaheuristic to deal with dynamic routing and scheduling scenarios using combined trip sharing and walking. The computational experiments show that our approach generates solutions in a fast and efficient way, thus, facilitating real-world operations and enabling rescheduling and rerouting. [Received 23 May 2015; Revised 14 October 2015; Accepted 8 December 2015]

Keywords: vehicle routing; synchronisation; home service scheduling; home healthcare; trip sharing; metaheuristics; discrete event processing; home services; home care; walking policies; vehicle reduction; arrival times; pickup locations; rescheduling; rerouting.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2016.076382

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2016 Vol.10 No.3, pp.323 - 340

Published online: 05 May 2016 *

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