Mamasis, K., Minis, I., Dikas, G.

Managing Vehicle Breakdown Incdents During Urban Distribution Product

Accepted for publication in JORS, 2012

Abstract

This paper addresses a case in which a vehicle, member of a fleet distributing a common single product, is immobilized permanently while executing its distribution plan. The other, active, vehicles of the fleet are then rerouted to serve the remaining non-served clients. We model this re-planning problem as a variation of the Team Orienteering Problem constraining all vehicle routes to an upper time, or distance, limit and taking into account the limited capacity of the fleet vehicles. We propose an efficient heuristic to provide solutions in almost real-time. The heuristic progressively constructs new routes for each active vehicle taking into account that a vehicle may replenish its load by visiting the warehouse or the immobilized vehicle. We solve the replenishment sub-problem by developing a fast labelling algorithm. To test the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic, we have developed a Genetic Algorithm (GA) that obtains high quality (but computationally expensive) solutions and compare them to those obtained by the heuristic.
Keywords: Team Orienteering Problem, Urban Distribution, Distribution Vehicle Breakdown, Vehicle Routing, City Logistics