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

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

Blog Article

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 D-3 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 Glutamine 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.