The Heterogeneous Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem: Mathematical formulations and solution algorithms

The aim of this paper is to introduce the Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Heterogeneous Fleet, a variant of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem. Flexibility is introduced in service schedules and delivered quantities, heterogeneity comes from different vehicles capacities and speeds. Three Mixed-Integer Linear Programming formulations and a matheuristic, based on Kernel Search, are proposed. Computational tests are made to evaluate the performance of the three formulations and to assess the quality of the solutions provided by the matheuristic.