Introducing service consistency in real-life client-oriented vehicle routing problems (R-5530)

Vehicle routing problems deal with constructing routes for a set of vehicles in order to satisfy a set of transportation requests. This project focuses on two client-oriented vehicle routing problems, the dial-a-ride problem and the homecare scheduling problem. Both problems originate from a social or healthcare service that is offered to individual persons in need of assistance (clients). Hence, offering high quality services is of key importance to service providers. Dial-a-ride services are concerned with transporting elderly and disabled people according to their requests, while homecare services are concerned with providing people with household and healthcare services at their homes. A crucial aspect of service quality is service consistency. Clients which require service regularly appreciate when they are serviced at roughly the same time and by the same person on each occasion. Although service consistency is considered as highly relevant in practice, it has hardly been studied in vehicle routing literature. This project studies how service consistency may be incorporated in vehicle routing models for dial-a-ride and homecare services. Due to the complexity of these models, heuristic solutions methods will be proposed. The project will provide service providers with (1) tools to account for service consistency in their planning process, and (2) the opportunity to assess the tradeoff between offering service consistency and operating costs.

Keywords:Distribution logistics, Freight transport

Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic development, innovation, technological change and growth, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism