A Generalized Consistent VRP with Optional Customers and Different Consistency Requirements

Currently, customers play a major role in todays’ businesses. They are also a major element in demands distribution. It encouraged us to consider customer requirements in the vehicle routing problem (VRP) to improve its efficiency. Consistency of services to customers is considered in the current study in a competitive distribution problem. In addition to the service consistency, its two other types whichare driver and arrival time consistencies are investigated, too. Therefore, a mixed integer programming model is presented in this paper. The problem is considered in a selective environment with presence of mandatory andoptional customers in which optional customers in case ofvisiting will have a soft consistency while mandatory ones should be visited with paying att ention t their required hard consistency. Based on the numerical analysis, it was concluded that the proposed model can perform more efficiently to visit more optional customers comparing to the classic consistent models.

Keywords:

General Consistency , VRP , Optional Customers , Consistency Level