The Consistent Vehicle Routing Problem with heterogeneous fleet

Customer relationship management is of high importance as it strengthens customer satisfaction. Providing consistent service cultivates retention and brand loyalty. This paper examines a new customer-oriented routing problem, the Consistent Vehicle Routing Problem with heterogeneous fleet. The objective to create cost-efficient plans, utilising fixed fleet vehicles operational characteristics, variable costs, while providing over multiple periods. Service consistency consists in person visiting time consistency. A mathematical model capturing all attributes problem developed utilised solve small-scale instances optimality. To address larger instances, hierarchical Tabu Search framework proposed. proposed metaheuristic utilises an upper-level underlying Variable Neighbourhood Descent algorithm. Computational experiments conducted on existing benchmark show flexibility, effectiveness efficiency framework. Various managerial insights are derived by examining cost imposing well customer–vehicle incompatibility constraints.