D.Aksen;CustomerSelection&ProfitMaximization in VehicleRoutingProblems

“Customer Selection and Profit Maximization in Vehicle Routing Problems” 

by

 Deniz Aksen 
 

College of Administrative Sciences and Economics,
Koç University, Istanbul

 

 Abstract:  The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP or simply VRP) is one of the most studied combinatorial optimization problems in the literature of operations research. The main reason for this much attention is the abundance of its real-life applications in distribution logistics and transportation. VRP and its single-objective variants pursue a traveling plan for a set of customers that are to be delivered goods from a single or multiple depots. The objective is usually to minimize the total traveling distance using a uniform or a heterogeneous vehicle fleet.

In the current VRP literature there are no more than a dozen papers, which consider the profit aspect of delivery services. Similar to the orienteering problem (OP) also in a VRP with profits (VRPP) it is not necessary to visit all customers. The visit to each customer results in a gross profit which is known a priori. The objective is to maximize the net total profit from visits to customers after the deduction of traveling costs. The main differences between OP and VRPP are nonuniform demand values, the imposition of vehicle capacity, and some temporal constraints, which arise as quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers.

In our research we focus on the single-depot capacitated VRP with profits and time deadlines (VRPP-TD). We propose an iterative marginal profit analysis framework for the solution of this problem. By employing either a classical heuristic or a metaheuristic, this solution procedure decides which customers to retain and which ones to discard. In our numerical experiments we compare the results obtained with the Clarke-Wright Parallel Savings heuristic and with the Simulated Annealing method.

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Biography:  Deniz Aksen received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from Boğaziçi University in 1994 and 1996. He worked for ABB Informatik in Mannheim in 1997. After completing his doctoral studies at Purdue University in 2003, he joined the business school at Koç University. His research mainly focuses on distribution logistics and location routing, lot-sizing models, and the design of telecommunications networks.

Date : April 6, 2005, Place: FENS, L030, Time: 13:40 – 14:30