The Consistent Vehicle Routing Problem: An Application to the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

With increasingly competitive markets, companies have turned their strategies towards process optimization to better respond to customer demands. The vehicle routing problem has gained greater prominence in this paradigm shift since, through its resolution, it can be obtained gains in improving the use of resources. In this paper, we developed a route planning methodology for a pharmaceutical distributor company that has recently changed the structure of its operations, thus being necessary to redefine its entire service to the different pharmacies, based in real instances. The proposed methodology combines an exact method with cluster-first, routing-second approach to solve a consistent route planning problem with multiple customers, time window constraints, heterogeneous fleet, and different delivery periods. It was possible to apply the method for large set of customers, achieving results with relatively low computational effort. The results demonstrate the methodology’s potential to reduce operational costs and improve overall service fulfillment.