A Reactive GRASP for a Sales Territory Design Problem with Multiple Balancing Requirements

Abstract: In this paper we present a Reactive GRASP approach to a sales territory design problem motivated by a real-world application in a beverage distribution firm. The mathematical framework includes, as planning criteria, minimizing a measure of territory compactness, balancing the different node activity measures among territories and territory contiguity. The proposed GRASP approach incorporates several features such as reactivity, by allowing self-adjustment of the restricted candidate list quality parameter, and filtering, which avoids executing the local search phase in unpromising bad solutions generated by the constuction phase. The algorithm is tested in several data sets randomly generated from data provided by the industrial partner. The results show the effectiviness of the proposed approach, as it was able to obtain solutions of much better quality (both in terms of its compactness measure and feasibility with respect to the balancing constraints) than those found by the firm in relatively fast computation times.