The Generalized Median Tour Problem: Modeling, Solving and an Application

• Main Authors: Carlos Obreque, German Paredes-Belmar, Pablo A. Miranda, Giovanni Campuzano, Gabriel Gutierrez-Jarpa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2020-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Combinatorial optimization; health supply chain; generalized median tour
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9206010/

We introduce, formulate, and solve the Generalized Median Tour Problem, which is motivated in the health supplies distribution for urban and rural areas. A region comprises districts that must be served by a specialized vehicle visiting its health facilities. We propose a distribution strategy to serve these health facilities efficiently. A single tour is determined that visits a set of health facilities (nodes) composed of disjoint clusters. The tour must visit at least one facility within each cluster, and the unvisited facilities are assigned to the closest facility on the tour. We minimize the sum of the total tour distance and the access distance traveled by the unvisited facilities. Efficient formulations are proposed and several solution strategies are developed to avoid subtours based on branch & cut. We solve a set of test instances and a real-world instance to show the efficiency of our solution approaches.