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Optimizing a Multi-Commodity Home-Delivery and Pickup Service in Depopulated Rural Areas with Constraint Programming

Authors Ryo Kuroiwa , Tomoki Hasegawa, Eiji Ueda, Naoki Akiyama, Akira Yoshioka

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Applied computing → Transportation
  • Computing methodologies → Modeling methodologies
  • Mathematics of computing → Combinatorial optimization
Keywords
  • Application
  • Operations Research & Mathematical Optimisation

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Abstract

We study a routing problem for delivering and picking up multiple commodities with different priorities, motivated by the need to provide basic services to people in depopulated rural areas with a driver shortage. We define our problem as a generalization of the team orienteering problem with time windows, with additional constraints motivated by real-world applications. We develop constraint programming (CP) and mixed-integer programming (MIP) models to solve the formulated problem. In addition, we propose an incremental warm-starting strategy, which obtains an initial solution by solving a problem considering only a subset of commodities. In our experiment, CP outperforms MIP, and incremental warm-starting improves the performance of both approaches.

Cite As Get BibTex

Ryo Kuroiwa, Tomoki Hasegawa, Eiji Ueda, Naoki Akiyama, and Akira Yoshioka. Optimizing a Multi-Commodity Home-Delivery and Pickup Service in Depopulated Rural Areas with Constraint Programming. In 32nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 379, pp. 36:1-36:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2026.36

Author Details

Ryo Kuroiwa
  • Principles of Informatics Division, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan
  • The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI, Kanagawa, Japan
Tomoki Hasegawa
  • Future Technology Laboratories INC., Nagoya, Japan
Eiji Ueda
  • Future Technology Laboratories INC., Nagoya, Japan
Naoki Akiyama
  • Toyota Motor Corporation, Tokyo, Japan
Akira Yoshioka
  • Toyota Motor Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

Supplementary Materials

References

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