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Cited by 23Vehicle Routing Optimization MethodsFacility Location and Emergency ManagementUrban and Freight Transport Logistics

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Vehicle routing with stochastic demand, service and waiting times — The case of food bank collection problems

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Reusken, Meike, Laporte, Gilbert, Rohmer, Sonja U.K., Cruijssen, Frans·2024·European Journal of Operational Research
DOI 10.1016/j.ejor.2024.03.031
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Abstract

Food banks play an important role both in combating food waste, and in alleviating hunger. However, due to the many uncertainties that food banks face, they often struggle to effectively collect all food items that donors such as supermarkets are willing to provide. To tackle this problem, we introduce the capacitated vehicle routing problem with travel time restrictions and stochastic demand, service and waiting times, in which the uncertainties are dependent of each other. This problem can be generalized to a large variety of routing applications. The goal of the problem is to determine a minimum number of vehicles, and to plan cost-effective routes for these vehicles so that each route violates the vehicle capacity and the travel time limit only with a very small probability. The resulting problem is highly complex and thus solved by means of a matheuristic, which decomposes the problem into its natural decision components. Thus, it first determines the number of districts into which the service area should be partitioned, before allocating each customer to exactly one district and then plans a route for each district. A set of feedback mechanisms is activated whenever no feasible solution has been found through these steps. Extensive numerical experiments, involving both randomly generated and real-life instances, demonstrate the matheuristic’s effectiveness in solving instances with up to 100 customers. When applying our matheuristic to real-life instances from Dutch and Canadian food banks, we furthermore gain managerial insights to assist in optimizing fleet size and route cost.

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Metadata

Authors
Reusken, M., Laporte, G., Rohmer, S. U. K., & Cruijssen, F.
Affiliations
  • Tilburg University (NL)
  • HEC Montréal (CA)
Corresponding author
Reusken, Meike
ORCID
Venue
European Journal of Operational Research
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2024-08
Volume
317
Issue
1
Pages
111-127
ISSN
0377-2217 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.ejor.2024.03.031
OpenAlex
W4393128897
Cited by
23
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 15 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 2
FWCI
4.70
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • European Journal of Operational Research (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Research portal (Tilburg University) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
Horizon Europe
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering › Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Facility Location and Emergency Management
  • Social Sciences › Transportation › Urban and Freight Transport Logistics
Keywords
vehicle routing, food banks, food collection, stochastic demand, stochastic service times, capacitated vehicle routing problem, matheuristic, fleet size optimization, food waste, hunger alleviation

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Vehicle routing with stochastic demand, service and waiting times — The case of food bank collection problems. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.ejor.2024.03.031
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Reusken, M., Laporte, G., Rohmer, S. U. K., & Cruijssen, F. (2024). Vehicle routing with stochastic demand, service and waiting times — The case of food bank collection problems. European Journal of Operational Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2024.03.031