Articolo in rivista, 2024, ENG, 10.3390/ math12030416

A Matheuristic Approach for the Multi-Depot Periodic Petrol Station Replenishment Problem

Pasquale Carotenuto, Stefano Giordani, Alessio Salvatore

Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo "M. Picone", Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 00185 Rome, Italy Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Impresa, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", 00133 Rome, Italy Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica "A. Ruberti", Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 00185 Rome, Italy

Planning petrol station replenishment is an important logistics activity for all the major oil companies. The studied Multi-Depot Periodic Petrol Station Replenishment problem derives from a real case in which the company must replenish a set of petrol stations from a set of depots, during a weekly planning horizon. The company must ensure refuelling according to available visiting patterns, which can be different from customer to customer. A visiting pattern predefines how many times (days) the replenishment occurs during a week and in which visiting days a certain amount of fuel must be delivered. To fulfill the weekly demand of each petrol station, one of the available replenishment plans must be selected among a given set of visiting patterns. The aim is to minimize the total distance travelled by the fleet of tank trucks during the entire planning horizon. A matheuristic approach is proposed, based on the cluster-first route-second paradigm, to solve it. The proposed approach is thoroughly tested on a set of realistic random instances. Finally, a weekly large real instance is considered with 194 petrol stations and two depots.

Mathematics 12 (3), pp. 1–19

Keywords

Petrol Station Replenishment, Multi-depot Periodic VRP, Matheuristic

CNR authors

Salvatore Alessio, Carotenuto Pasquale

CNR institutes

IAC – Istituto per le applicazioni del calcolo "Mauro Picone"