Comparison and Generic Model Formulation of Home Delivered Services
摘要
An increasing number of service providers deliver products and services to our homes. Examples are health care, deliveries of goods like parcels, food or groceries as well as repairs or cleaning services. These types of services are subject to similar operational planning: clients need to be assigned to a service provider. For each of these service providers a route and a schedule need to be designed. Extended vehicle routing problems with time windows (VRPTW) display these planning problems. To the best of our knowledge, in literature, most articles tackle only one of the home services with the VRPTW, despite their similarities. We compare existing model extensions of different service types and develop a generic home delivered services routing and scheduling problem (HDSRSP) that covers three different service types. Preliminary tests on benchmark instances show that the model is capable of solving these problems. This lays the foundation for further research regarding general solution approaches for home delivered services.