Abstract
We address a routing/assignment problem posed by Neoturf, which is a Portuguese company working in the area of project, building and garden’s maintenance. The aim is to define a procedure for scheduling and routing efficiently its clients of garden maintenance services. The company has two teams available throughout the year to handle all the maintenance jobs. Each team consists of two or three employees with a fully-equipped vehicle capable of carrying out every kind of maintenance service. At the beginning of each year, the number and frequency of maintenance interventions to conduct during the year, for each client, are agreed. Time windows are established so that visits to the client should occur only within these periods. There are clients that are supposed to be always served by the same team, but other clients can be served indifferently by any of the two teams. Since clients are geographically spread over a wide region, the total distance traveled while visiting clients is a factor that weighs heavily on the company costs. Neoturf is concerned with reducing these costs, while satisfying agreements with its clients. We give a mixed integer linear programming formulation for the problem, discuss limitations on the size of instances that can be solved to guarantee optimality, present a modification of the Clarke and Wright heuristic for the vehicle routing with time windows, and report preliminary computational results obtained with Neoturf data.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
AMPL modelling language, Mar 2013. Available online at: http://www.ampl.com/
Ascheuer, N., Fischetti, M., Grötschel, M.: Solving the asymmetric travelling salesman problem with time windows by branch-and-cut. Math. Progr. Ser. A 90, 475–506 (2001)
Bräysy, O., Gendreau, M.: Vehicle routing problem with time windows, Part I: route construction and local search algorithms. Trans. Sci. 39(1), 104–118 (2005)
Clarke, G., Wright, J.W.: Scheduling of vehicles from a Central Depot to a number of delivery points. Oper. Res. 12(4), 568–581 (1964)
Desaulniers, G., Madsen, O.B.G., Ropke, S.: Vehicle routing problems with time windows. In: Toth, P., Vigo, D. (eds.) Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications, 2nd edn. MOS-SIAM Series on Optimization, pp. 119–159. SIAM, Philadelphia (2014)
Golden, B.L., Raghavan, S., Wasil, E.A.: The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges. Springer, New York (2008)
Hopcroft, J.E., Karp, R.M.: An n 5∕2 algorithm for maximum matchings in bipartite graphs. SIAM J. Comput. 2(4), 225–231 (1973)
Kumar, S.N., Panneerselvam, R.: A survey on the vehicle routing problem and its variants. Intell. Inf. Manag. 4, 66–74 (2012)
MATLAB, The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, (2010). http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/
NEOS Server, Mar 2013. Available online at: http://www.neos-server.org/
Toth, P., Vigo, D.: The Vehicle Routing Problem. SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications. SIAM, Philadelphia (2002)
Toth, P., Vigo, D.: Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications, 2nd edn. MOS-SIAM Series on Optimization. SIAM, Philadelphia (2014)
Acknowledgements
The problem addressed in this paper was presented by Neoturf at the 86th European Study Group with Industry, held at ISEP/IPP, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, 7–11 May 2012. The authors are grateful to Neoturf for providing data and for feedback on results.
The authors were supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). J. O. Cerdeira was funded through the project UID/MAT/00297/2013, CMA (Centro de Matemática Aplicada). M. Cruz was supported by Laboratório de Engenharia Matemática. A. Moura was funded through the project UID/MAT/00144/2013 of CMUP (Centro de Matemática da Universidade do Porto).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cerdeira, J.O., Cruz, M., Moura, A. (2015). A Routing/Assignment Problem in Garden Maintenance Services. In: Almeida, J., Oliveira, J., Pinto, A. (eds) Operational Research. CIM Series in Mathematical Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20328-7_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20328-7_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20327-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20328-7
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)