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.
Keywords
- Mixed Integer Linear Programming Formulation
- Maintenance Jobs
- VRP With Time Windows (VRPTW)
- Consecutive Working Days
- Consecutive Work
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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).
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20328-7_9
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