Customer satisfaction in dynamic vehicle routing problem with time windows

• A dynamic vehicle routing problem focusing on customer satisfaction is solved.
• An evolutionary approach coupled to a customer satisfaction strategy is proposed.
• The strategy inserts future anticipated visits favoring customer satisfaction.
• Results show the value of advance planning and strategy on customer satisfaction.

The dynamic vehicle routing and scheduling problem is a well-known complex combinatorial optimization problem that drew significant attention over the past few years. This paper presents a novel algorithm introducing a new strategy to integrate anticipated future visit requests during plan generation, aimed at explicitly improving customer satisfaction. An evaluation of the proposed strategy is performed using a hybrid genetic algorithm previously designed for the dynamic vehicle problem with time windows that we modified to capture customer satisfaction over multiple visits. Simulations compare the value of the revisited algorithm exploiting the new strategy, clearly demonstrating its impact on customer satisfaction level.