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The multi-vehicle cumulative covering tour problem

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Abstract

This paper introduces the multi-vehicle cumulative covering tour problem whose motivation arises from humanitarian logistics. The objective is to determine a set of tours that must be followed by a fleet of vehicles in order to minimize the sum of arrival times (latency) at each visited location. There are three types of locations: mandatory, optional, and unreachable. Each mandatory location must be visited, and optional locations are visited in order to cover the unreachable locations. To guarantee the vehicle autonomy, the duration of each tour should not exceed a given time limit. A mixed integer linear formulation and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure are proposed for this problem. The performance of the algorithm is assessed over a large set of instances adapted from the literature. Computational results confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

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Acknowledgments

Partial funding for this project has been provided by CONACYT (National Council of Science and Technology from Mexico), the SMI program (Soutien á la Mobilité Internationale) of the National Polytechnical Institute of Toulouse (INP-Toulouse) and the French National Research Agency through the ATHENA project under the Grant ANR-13-BS02-0006, and by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under Grant 39682-10. Thanks are due to the referees who provided valuable comments and to Há et al. (2013) for sharing their instance set with us.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Program in Systems Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, San Nicolás de los Garza, Mexico

    David A. Flores-Garza & M. Angélica Salazar-Aguilar

  2. Univ de Toulouse, INP, LAAS, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Sandra Ulrich Ngueveu

  3. CNRS, LAAS, 7 avenue du Colonel Roche, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Sandra Ulrich Ngueveu

  4. Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management, HEC Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Gilbert Laporte

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  1. David A. Flores-Garza
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  2. M. Angélica Salazar-Aguilar
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  3. Sandra Ulrich Ngueveu
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  4. Gilbert Laporte
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Correspondence to M. Angélica Salazar-Aguilar.

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Flores-Garza, D.A., Salazar-Aguilar, M.A., Ngueveu, S.U. et al. The multi-vehicle cumulative covering tour problem. Ann Oper Res 258, 761–780 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-015-2062-7

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