In many European countries, municipalities offer their inhabitants a wide variety of social services. In this paper we will focus on efficiently scheduling home care, transportation of the elderly, and home meal delivery. These so-called municipal or communal routing problems can be modelled as different variants of the vehicle routing problem, a well-known optimization problem from the literat...

I this paper, we present a solution approach for the inventory-routing problem. The inventory-routing problem is a variation of the vehicle-routing problem that arises in situations where a vendor has the ability to make decisions about the timing and sizing of deliveries, as well as the routing, with the restriction that customers are not allowed to run out of product. We develop a two-phase a...

The home care nurses routing and scheduling problem consists in determining the sequences of visits performed by home care nurses to patients. Very often public medical clinics are responsible for this planning. The problem shows similarities with the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) but it also includes additional constraints related to medical restrictions and to the continui...

Two of the most complex activities in production and operations management (POM) are inventory planning and operations scheduling. This chapter presents two problems related to these activities, namely, the capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem and the capacitated vehicle routing problem. For each of these problems, the authors discuss several solution methods, present a competitive gen...

The routing and scheduling of vehicles and their crews is an area of increasing importance. In this paper, we describe a large scale vehicle scheduling and routing problem which is of great importance to parcel distribution companies. We devise a Breeder Genetic Algorithm capable of dealing with up to 10,000 transportation requests to be serviced by an inhomoge-neous fleet of vehicles within a ...

We use a local search method we term Large Neighbourhood Search (LNS) for solving vehicle routing problems. LNS meshes well with constraint programming technology and is analogous to the shuffling technique of job-shop scheduling. The technique explores a large neighbourhood of the current solution by selecting a number of customer visits to remove from the routing plan, and re-inserting these ...