In this paper we consider the final distribution of fuel oil from a storage depot to a set of petrol stations faced by an oil company,udwhich has to decide the weekly replenishment plan for each station, and determine petrol station visiting sequences (vehicleudroutes) for each day of the week, assuming a fleet of homogeneous vehicles (tankers). The aim is to minimize the total distanceudtravelled by tankers during the week, while loading tankers possibly near to their capacity in order to maximize the resourceudutilization. The problem is modelled as a generalization of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP). Due to the large sizeudof the real instances which the company has to deal with, we solve the problem heuristically. We propose a hybrid geneticudalgorithm that successfully address the problem inspired to a known hybrid genetic algorithm from the literature for the PVRP.udHowever, the proposed algorithm adopts some techniques and features tailored for the particular fuel oil distribution problem,udand it is specifically designed to deal with real instances derived from the fuel oil distribution in the European context that areudprofoundly different from the PVRP instances available from literature. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a set of real caseudstudies and on a set of randomly generated instances that hold the same characteristics of the former.
展开▼
