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Solving the home service assignment, routing, and appointment scheduling (H-SARA) problem with uncertainties

Abstract:

The Home Service Assignment, Routing, and Appointment scheduling (H-SARA) problem integrates the strategic fleet-sizing, tactical assignment, operational vehicle routing and scheduling problems at different decision levels, with a single period planning horizon and uncertainty (stochasticity) from the service duration, travel time, and customer cancellation rate. We propose a stochastic mixedinteger linear programming model for the H-SARA problem. Additionally, a reduced deterministic version is introduced which allows to solve small-scale instances to optimality with two acceleration approaches. For larger instances, we develop a tailored two-stage decision support system that provides high-quality and in-time solutions based on information revealed at different stages. Our solution method aims to reduce various costs under stochasticity, to create reasonable routes with balanced workload and team-based customer service zones, and to increase customer satisfaction by introducing a two-stage appointment notification system updated at different time stages before the actual service. Our two-stage heuristic is competitive to CPLEX's exact solution methods in providing time and cost-effective decisions and can update previously-made decisions based on an increased level of information. Results show that our two-stage heuristic is able to tackle reasonablesize instances and provides good-quality solutions using less time compared to the deterministic and stochastic models on the same set of simulated instances.