Article ID: | iaor20116886 |
Volume: | 186 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 61 |
End Page Number: | 81 |
Publication Date: | Jun 2011 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Gendreau Michel, Campbell M, Thomas W |
Keywords: | heuristics, programming: probabilistic |
In this paper, we introduce a variant of the orienteering problem in which travel and service times are stochastic. If a delivery commitment is made to a customer and is completed by the end of the day, a reward is received, but if a commitment is made and not completed, a penalty is incurred. This problem reflects the challenges of a company who, on a given day, may have more customers than it can serve. In this paper, we discuss special cases of the problem that we can solve exactly and heuristics for general problem instances. We present computational results for a variety of parameter settings and discuss characteristics of the solution structure.