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Consistent Routing and Scheduling with Simultaneous Pickups and Deliveries
Author(s) -
Emadikhiav Mohsen,
Bergman David,
Day Robert
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/poms.13200
Subject(s) - tardiness , scheduling (production processes) , computer science , consistency (knowledge bases) , enforcement , implementation , operations research , due date , routing (electronic design automation) , mathematical optimization , vehicle routing problem , retard , job shop scheduling , mathematics , computer network , psychology , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , political science , law , queue , programming language
We study the planning and scheduling of order shipments among laboratories of an instrument‐calibration company. To address a generic version of the company’s combined routing and scheduling problem, we introduce a model variant with simultaneous pickups and deliveries in which consistency of site visits is also desired. We provide alternative formulations of the problem and propose branch‐and‐check and branch‐and‐price implementations, with an analysis of the instance characteristics for which each of these algorithms outperforms the other. Using the data collected from the company, our results indicate that the proposed framework can help the company to significantly reduce transportation costs and shipment times. We also investigate the influence of consistency and tardiness bounds on transportation costs, showing that while tardiness bounds significantly increase transportation costs, the enforcement of consistency requirements results in more consistent solutions at only slightly higher cost. The impact of enforcing consistency requirements increases when tighter tardiness bounds are imposed.