A MILP approach combined with clustering to solve a special petrol station replenishment problem

Abstract

Vehicle routing problem is a well-known optimization problem in the logistics area. A special case of the vehicle routing problem is the station replenishment problem in which different types of fuel types have to be transported from the depots to the customers. In this paper we study the replenishment problem of a European petrol company. The problem contains several additional constraints such as time windows, different sized compartment vehicles, and restrictions on the vehicles that can serve a customer. We introduce a mixed integer linear programming model of the problem. To reduce the size complexity of the MILP model the customers are clustered and, based on the clusters, additional constraints are added to the MILP model. The resulting MILP model is tested on real problems of the company. The results show that combining the MILP model with clustering improves the effectiveness of the model.