Introduction:

This work proposes a model and two heuristic algorithms to assign customers to trucks and visit days as a first phase in the solution of a real-world routing problem, which is closely related to the PVRP (Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem), but a strategic decision of the company imposes the additional constraint that every customer must always be visited by the same truck.

Methods:

The proposed model will group the customers that are visited the same day by the same truck as close as possible by means of centroid-based clustering. The first proposed heuristic has a constructive stage and three underlying improvement heuristics, while the second uses an exact linear programming algorithm.

Results:

The algorithms are evaluated by instances taken from the literature and generated, taking into account the characteristics presented in the real-world case.

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