A heuristic approach for a logistics districting problem

This article addresses a logistics districting problem for a company whose operations consist of the pickup and delivery of packages within a region. The service region is to be divided into districts, each served by a single vehicle that departs from a central depot. The district design aims to optimize two criteria: compact district shape and balance of workload content among districts. We present a mathematical formulation of the problem as well as a multi-start heuristic procedure to solve the problem. The procedure combines some elements of metaheuristics such as Tabu Search and GRASP. Experimental results in comparison with CPLEX solutions are presented.