A hybrid metaheuristic approach to optimize the districting design of a parcel company

Abstract

In this article we address a districting problem faced by a pickup and delivery parcel company over a determined service region. The service region is divided into districts, each served by a single vehicle that departs from a central depot. Two objectives are optimized: compactness and balance of the workload content among the districts. We present a mathematical formulation of the problem and a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Numerical results are presented in comparison to CPLEX 11.1 solutions for the smaller size instances. The results show that the heuristic performs well. The algorithm is able to solve moderate size instances in reasonable computational time, given the strategic nature of the problem.