An agile and reactive biased-randomized heuristic for an agri-food rich vehicle routing problem

Trabajo presentado en: R-Evolucionando el transporte, XIV Congreso de Ingeniería del Transporte (CIT 2021), realizado en modalidad online los días 6, 7 y 8 de julio de 2021, organizado por la Universidad de BurgosOperational problems in agri-food supply chains usually show characteristics that are scarcely addressed by traditional academic approaches. These characteristics make an already NP-hard problem even more challenging; hence, this problem requires the use of tailor-made algorithms in order to solve it efficiently. This work addresses a rich vehicle routing problem in a real-world agri-food supply chain. Different types of animal food products are distributed to raising-pig farms. These products are incompatible, i.e., multicompartment heterogeneous vehicles must be employed to perform the distribution activities. The problem considers constraints regarding visit priorities among farms, and not-allowed access of large vehicles to a subset of farms. Finally, a set of flat tariffs are employed to formulate the cost function. This problem is solved employing a reactive savings-based biased-randomized heuristic, which does not require any time-costly parameter fine-tuning process. Our results show savings in both cost and traveled distance when compared with the real supply chain performance.This work has been partially supported by the Doctoral School of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain), the Universidad de La Sabana (Colombia, Grant INGPhD-12-2020), and the EU-IoF2020 project (282300206-UC005)