Condominium company cuts travel distance using route planning model
Routes planning in a condominium company using mathematical optimization
Discrete Mathematics
Summary
Planning daily routes for workers to visit customers at specific times can be complicated. The authors created a model that helps assign employees with the right skills to each customer visit while respecting work hours, breaks, and travel times. Their model minimizes total travel distance and manages lunch breaks efficiently. This approach improves the company’s daily operations and could help other service companies plan visits better.
What this means in practice
- •For facility management teams: Schedule maintenance or service visits to multiple locations efficiently while matching employee skills and minimizing travel time and distance.
- •For commercial cleaning companies: Plan daily cleaning routes that respect customer availability, employee expertise, and breaks to reduce overall travel distance and improve service quality.
Authors
Lara Rocha, Pedro Martins
Abstract
This work focuses on planning daily routes for a group of employees of a condominium company. Given a set of employees and a set of customers with pre-scheduled visits, we want to build doubly-open routes to guarantee visits to all customers, ensuring that each customer is visited by an employee with the appropriate skills to carry out the required activity. The travel times between customers and the service time in each customer are known. The problem includes time windows for visiting customers, each employee has a maximum working time, and the daily working period is between 9 AM and 6:30 PM. The routes respect the lunch break period if they extend from morning to afternoon, which means that lunch break can be avoided if the route is fully completed in the morning or in the afternoon. The aim is to minimize the distance covered by all routes with a penalty for including lunch breaks. The distances and times between customers are collected via an API to Microsoft Azure; and the solutions are then displayed on Bing Maps. The results obtained show the operational advantages of an efficient and effective vehicle routing planning in a specific condominium management company. The model can be extended to other service provider companies.