Problem 1

Challenge Title| Route Optimization for a set of vendors.

Brief description of the challenge:

A company whose vision is to be one of the world leaders in transport solutions, construction equipment and agricultural equipment has, over the last few years, invested in industrial mathematics with the aim of improving its efficiency in several dimensions.

The challenge proposed for this Iberian Modelling Week is based on determining the best partition of customers among the company’s sales staff and building the respective visit route. Each customer has a member of staff (sales staff) associated with it, who must carry out a visit with a certain frequency (depending on the type of customer). At this moment, there is already a partition of the customers with respect to the salesmen.

This challenge has two main goals:

1) Given the existing partition of customers, how to find an optimal route to visit customers considering the last time they were visited, the periodicity of the visits and the distances between customers.

2) Given the matrix of distances between customers, is there a more favourable partition of customers, taking into account the number of available salesmen?

Mathematical background | Optimization.