Multi-Period Vehicle Routing with Limited Period Load

We investigate a vehicle routing problem, in which the total workload associated with a given request portfolio must be distributed over a sequence of periods. The realization of economies of scale by compiling routes serving a high number of requests is compromised by an upper bound of the payload quantity that is allowed to be served in one period. We propose a mixed-integer linear problem for the representation of this complicated decision task. Within computational experiments, we analyze the impacts of differently mixed request portfolios with respect to the minimization of the total sum of travel distances over all periods and other performance indicators.