Scheduling periodic customer visits for a traveling salesperson

Scheduling periodic customer visits for a traveling salesperson

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Article ID: iaor2009252
Country: Netherlands
Volume: 179
Issue: 3
Start Page Number: 823
End Page Number: 837
Publication Date: Jun 2007
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
Authors: , , , ,
Keywords: heuristics: local search, programming: travelling salesman, agriculture & food, artificial intelligence: decision support
Abstract:

The problem considered in this paper deals with determining daily routes for a traveling salesperson who provides customers in Upper Austria with product range information of a large, global food wholesaler. Each customer has to be visited at least once a year, with some customers requiring up to one visit per month. Further, some customers may not be visited each day of the week. Our decision support system uses a commercial GIS software to extract customer data for input into the optimization procedure and to visualize the results obtained by the algorithm. The optimization approach is based on the variable neighborhood search algorithm which assigns customers to days and determines routes for the salesperson for each day with the primary objective to minimize the total travel time of the salesperson. Another objective studied is to minimize the number of days needed by the salesperson to visit all customers in a given month.

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