Vehicle routing issue with demand coverage concerns, mutual demand interdependence and ultimate customer satisfaction

Vehicle routing is one of the significant issues in the field of Logistics management and despite many endeavors for integrating this issue with other fields of logistics, most of its aspects require research and development. The selection of interdependent factors in vehicle routing is one of these approaches and it can have a considerable impact on price increase, income decrease, lost sale, dissatisfaction of customers and increase in returned goods. This issue is the rewritten classic model of vehicle routing by considering the approach of selecting a customer as one of the significant approaches in the distribution management. The main idea of this article is to consider the fact that the number of requests for each region is a fixed amount and if goods were distributed among several sellers in that region, all of the requests would be divided among these sellers, which is not desirable for the sellers and results in considerable distribution expenses. Above all, the satisfaction of ultimate consumers depends on broad distribution and if distributed among more ones, there would be greater satisfaction. Based on this idea, in the present research, a new formulation from this issue in the form of a two-purpose mathematical model has been presented by putting together the classic vehicle routing and the approach of selective distribution. In this research, firstly, a review of the literature of this subject has been carried out, and then the issue has been raised. Following that, based on the limiting assumptions describing the conditions of the issue, modeling of vehicle routing with the approach of selecting interdependent factors has been considered and mathematical modeling has been presented. This model with a set of sample data has been dealt with and its reliability has been assessed.