On 15-05-13 03:35, Raoul Cousins wrote:

I am interested in solving periodic vehicle routing problems and other multi-day (but static and deterministic) vehicle routing variants.

These are similar to standard VRP except that not every customer is visited each day. In some variants, the days to visit each node are chosen from some predefined schedules; in others, each node has to be visited a specific number of times over the course of several days.

Would Optaplanner be a good choice to model such problems? I know it's not a very well-defined question, but I'm wondering if there would be any serious difficulties modeling this type of problem before I dive into the programming.

Definitely :)

It's just a matter of choosing your class design wisely.
Just like the VRP example:
- Use a single PlanningEntity Visit, which represents 1 stop at a customer.
- Use a single PlanningVariable previousAppearance, which is a Visit or a VehicleSingleDayTrip (instead of a Vehicle)

The difference with the example is that the anchor of a chain (see "chained variables" in documentation)
is not a Vehicle, but a VehicleSingleDayTrip.
A VehicleSingleDayTrip is the combination of a Vehicle and a Day.

The rest are just score constraint rules:
- "days to visit each node are chosen from some predefined schedules"
- "each node has to be visited a specific number of times over the course of several days"

Thank you!

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