Routing Courier Delivery Services with Urgent Demand

Abstract Courier delivery services in many cases are faced with sporadic, tightly constrained, urgent requests in addition to regular demand. An example of such an application is the transportation of medical specimens, where an efficient delivery is crucial in providing high quality and affordable service. However, the presence of random urgent requests, due to medical emergencies, can create substantial additional costs if not taken into account. We model this problem as a multi-trip vehicle routing problem with time windows using stochastic programming with recourse to represent the random urgent requests. We develop an insertion based heuristic with a tabu-search improvement phase to solve this problem. Our computational results show that this approach obtains significant improvement in travel costs as well as in route similarity over alternative methods, both on randomly generated data as well as on a real data set provided by a leading healthcare provider in Southern California.

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