A unified model framework for the multiattribute consistent periodic vehicle routing problem

Modeling real-life transportation problems usually require the simultaneous incorporation of different variants of the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP). The periodic VRP (PVRP) is a classical extension in which routes are determined for a planning period of several days and each customer has an associated set of allowable visit schedules. This work proposes a unified model framework for PVRP that consists of multiple attributes or variants not previously addressed simultaneously, such as time-windows, time-dependence, and consistency-which guarantees the visits to customer by the same vehicle-, together with three objective functions that respond to the needs of practical problems. The numerical experimentation is focused on the effects of three factors: frequency, depot centrality, and the objective function on the performance of a general-purpose MILP solver, through the analysis of the achieved relative gaps. Results show higher sensitivity to the objective functions and to the problem sizes. © 2020 Baldoquin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.