Operations research applied to vehicle routing

Abstract

Operations Research (OR) is a scientific approach used to solve problems which arise in situations that require using scarce resources efficiently. Such situations are quite common in industrial and logistical contexts and therefore OR has played an important role within Production Engineering. Among several OR branches, Optimization provides mathematical and computational tools for modeling and solving problems. The advantage is that currently powerful optimization software are available to help analyzing and solving optimization problems. In this research project, we plan to study the foundations of optimization and the main models and methods applied in the vehicle routing context. This study will include classical models as well as those involving practical features such as heterogeneous fleets, limited vehicle capacity, time windows, multiple deliverymen, pickup and delivery requests, among others. These models will be applied to solving instances from the literature, using of Optimization softwares. The different formulations will be compared and, if possible, combined with the purpose of modeling practical vehicle routing situations. The ultimate goal is to propose new formulations for the vehicle routing problem with multiple deliverymen, which has been recently proposed in the literature, in order to incorporate additional features that are typically found in practice. This project is associated to the FAPESP Thematic Project 2010/10133-0 and to the FAPESP Regular Research Award 2014/00939-8, which address practical variants of the vehicle routing problem and thus will allow the student to collaborate with these researches. (AU)