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Optimizing single vehicle many-to-many operations with desired delivery times. I: Scheduling. (English) Zbl 0608.90043

A set of n customers is given. Each customer has a desired point of pickup, a desired point of delivery and a desired time of delivery. The problem is to determine the order of pickup and delivery and the times of pickup and delivery of these n customers by a single vehicle in order to minimize total customer inconvenience. Here, a mathematical programming formulating of this problem is subjected to Benders’ decomposition procedure. The result is a heuristic routing and scheduling algorithm which is shown to produce high quality solutions in reasonable computation time by testing on moderately sized real data bases from both Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Baltimore, Maryland. This study is divided into two parts, the first detailing the scheduling analysis and the second focusing on the routing component.

MSC:

90B35 Deterministic scheduling theory in operations research
90C08 Special problems of linear programming (transportation, multi-index, data envelopment analysis, etc.)
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