A Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Driver Consistency and Arrival-Time Diversification

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Llagas, J, Stavropoulou, F orcid iconORCID: 0000-0003-2461-4456 and Wøhlk, S (2026) A Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Driver Consistency and Arrival-Time Diversification. Computers & Operations Research. ISSN 0305-0548

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Abstract

We study a Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem that integrates driver consistency and arrival-time diversification. Driver consistency requires each customer to be served by the same vehicle across all service periods, while arrival-time diversification enforces temporal separation between visits in different periods. We first propose a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming formulation and an exact Logic-Based Benders Decomposition implemented through a Branch-and-Check scheme, where a multi-period VRP with driver consistency is handled in the master problem and arrival-time diversification is addressed in the subproblem. Building on this structure, we develop a matheuristic that exploits the subproblem in an efficient and targeted manner. As arrival-time diversification checks are computationally expensive, we propose a feasibility check procedure over a restricted search space.
Computational results show that the branch-and-check approach solves medium-scale instances to optimality, while the matheuristic achieves near-optimal solutions in significantly shorter computation times. Lastly, the impact of arrival-time diversification is examined and managerial insights are derived.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: 0102 Applied Mathematics; 0103 Numerical and Computational Mathematics; Operations Research; 3509 Transportation, logistics and supply chains; 4901 Applied mathematics
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5001 Business
Divisions: Liverpool Business School
Publisher: Elsevier
Date of acceptance: 4 September 2026
Date of first compliant Open Access: 14 September 2026
Date Deposited: 14 Sep 2026 15:01
Last Modified: 14 Sep 2026 15:01
DOI or ID number: 10.1016/j.cor.2026.107672
URI: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29400
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