Dynamic Multi-Period Vehicle Routing with Touting

This paper introduces a dynamic vehicle routing problem with touting as demand management technique, where customers that have not yet placed an order can be actively encouraged to order a service sooner. Touting the right customers, such as those located nearby customers who already placed orders, allows for more efficient routes over time. However, it also increases the frequency of visits at such touted customers which leads to smaller collection volumes. To tackle this trade-off, we propose several strategies to decide which customers to tout and when, and combine these touting strategies with two rolling-time horizon dynamic vehicle routing algorithms. The different strategies are empirically compared in a simulation based on a real-world waste collection problem. We demonstrate that touting indeed allows to significantly reduce the travel distance in a dynamic vehicle routing problem.