A Vehicle Routing System to Solve a Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem for a Food Chain in Hong Kong

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In this paper, we describe the system that we have developed to solve a new variant of the periodic vehicle routing problem with time windows (PVRPTW) for one of the largest food and restaurant chains in Hong Kong. The extension is to limit the number of drivers that any store should see during the fixed period. We name this constraint as limited visiting quota (LVQ). We devise a new method to solve this problem. Our experimental results indicate that our method is able to reduce the number of vehicles used by 23% and thus bring substantial savings to our client. The solver has been integrated into an existing vehicle routing product called VROOM for the daily usage of our client.