In this paper we introduce the Periodic Petrol Station Replenishment Problem (PPSRP) over a T-day planning horizon and we describe four heuristic methods for its solution. Even though all the proposed heuristics belong to the common partitioning-then-routing paradigm, they differ in the way of assigning the stations to each day of the horizon. The resulting daily routing problems are then solved exactly till optimality. Moreover, an improvement procedure is also developed with the aim of ensuring a better solution quality. Our heuristics are tested and compared on two instances of a real-life test problem and our computational results show encouraging improvements with respect to a human planning solution.
Citation
Working Paper December 2012