A location–routing–loading problem for bill delivery services

A telecommunication service company in Hong Kong considers printing and delivering its monthly bills to well-structured and densely populated housing estates by the in-house delivery team. There is a large customer base that prefers receiving paper bills for personal or company accounting purposes. The use of in-house delivery team would be more cost-effective than the existing practice of employing the Post Office service. With the anticipated increase of housing estates in the newly developed areas, management is considering to relocate the existing bill delivery office and set up some delivery depot sites at the existing company buildings. Metaheuristic approach based on threshold accepting and simulated annealing is developed to assist in making facility location, vehicle routing and loading decisions. The computerized algorithm has been tested by the operation team and is well perceived by the management. It shows significant improvement over the existing manual approach and will be a tool useful for planning future office locations in Hong Kong.