نبذة مختصرة : In this paper, we address a special case of periodic vehicle routing problem where each customer has a non-negative supply or demand of a single product which is unpaired. We refer to this novel variant of periodic vehicle routing problem as Periodic Unpaired Pickup and Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem. The objective of our problem is to design the pickup and delivery vehicle routes to meet required service levels of customers minimizing the total transportation cost while satisfying certain operational constraints. This problem is driven by food relief operations in Sydney. It can be defined as a large scale collection, distribution and inventory management problem in the supply chain system. The logistics aspect of our approach is to design and execute a vehicle routing problem for food rescue and delivery network, where rescued food is collected from different food providers at multiple locations and delivered to welfare agencies. Our specific goals are to develop an integer linear programming model for this new variant of periodic vehicle routing problem and to propose an integer-programming based heuristic solution approach to solve the problem introduced in the paper. We test our heuristic algorithm with small instances created from Cordeau’s benchmark instances and validate our solution approach against the optimal solutions obtained through exact method before implementing it on food rescue and delivery network. We find that the heuristic approach is comparable with the optimal solution and is able to solve the real-world scenarios using significantly fewer resources than are employed in practice.
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