GRASP Strategies for a Bi-objective Commercial Territory Design Problem

Abstract: In this work a problem motivated by a real-world case from a beverage distribution firm in Mexico is addressed. Different planning criteria are taken into account in order to create acceptable territory designs. Namely, each territory needs to be compact, connected and balanced according to two attributes (number of costumers and sales volume). We propose a bi-objective programming model and two solution procedures (B-GRASP and T-GRASP), this problem has not been addressed before to the best of our knowledge. B-GRASP and T-GRASP are based in a heuristic procedure best known as GRASP. The main dierence between B-GRASP and T-GRASP is the way they consider the planning criteria during the construction phase. In B-GRASP, the construction attempts to find high quality solutions based on the optimization of two criteria: compactness and balancing according to the number of customers, demand is treated as a constraint. The construction phase in T-GRASP considers three objectives to be optimized: the compactness and the balancing with respect to the two attributes (number of customers and sales volume). Both procedures are evaluated on a variety of problem instances.