The Fixed Routes Assignment Considering Fluctuant Customer Demand

A variant VRP problem is introduced by considering available multi-period customer demand and split delivery, where the split delivery strategy is used to cope the periodic fluctuation of customer demand, that the demand exceeded the vehicle capacity may be fulfilled by the identical fixed route traveled in different period. The objective is to minimize the total operational cost including the traveling cost, the split delivery cost, and the fixed cost of fleet size. A genetic algorithm-based approach augmented with the dynamic programming is developed to solve the described problem. This paper is unique in considering multi-period demand of customers and addressing the reduction of workload variation by the split delivery strategy. Computational results find the proposed approach significantly outperforms in the reduction of total distance traveled and the number of vehicles utilized over the planning horizon