Title: Solution approaches for multi-workday vehicle routing problem with manual unloading

Authors: Tarit Rattanamanee; Suebsak Nanthavanij; Aussadavut Dumrongsiri

Addresses: Department of Materials Handling and Logistics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Bangkok 10800, Thailand ' School of Management Technology, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, Pathum Thani, 12121, Thailand ' School of Management Technology, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, Pathum Thani, 12121, Thailand

Abstract: The daily delivery routes and carried loads of vehicles are determined for a multi-workday planning period. Upon arrival at customer locations, workers, who are pre-assigned to vehicles, must perform manual unloading of goods. The multi-workday vehicle routing problem (MW-VRP) with manual unloading is solved using three solution approaches, namely, minimum-distance fixed-route, minimum-distance varying-route and workload-balanced varying-route. The total travel distances of vehicles and average percent residual energies among workers are determined and compared among the three approaches. The results show that the MW-VRP which considers the physical workloads that workers have to endure each workday throughout the planning period can help to distribute daily manual handling tasks more evenly among workers.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem; VRP; multi-workday planning; physical workload balancing; worker-vehicle pre-assignment.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2021.119697

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2021 Vol.39 No.3, pp.340 - 360

Received: 18 Jun 2019
Accepted: 01 Nov 2019
Published online: 16 Dec 2021 *

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