Rolling-Horizon Approach for Kerosene Routing Problem

Kerosene delivery is a service that regularly supplies kerosene to household tanks to prevent them from running dry. Delivery companies create kerosene delivery plans to maintain tank levels and implement deliveries based on these plans. This paper focuses on a heuristic using the Rolling-Horizon (RH) Approach, which is considered for daily kerosene delivery planning, due to the difficulty in solving existing heuristics within a reasonable time frame. The proposed method aims to shorten execution time while maintaining the accuracy of solutions. Experiments were conducted using two types of instances: benchmark instances and kerosene delivery instances based on real data, to examine whether the application of the RH Approach is effective in both problems and to clarify the conditions under which the method is effective. The results indicate the possibility of a trade-off relationship between solution accuracy and execution time through the application of the RH Approach only in the kerosene delivery planning problem. Furthermore, by considering the differences between inventory routing and kerosene delivery problems, it was shown that this trade-off relationship is more likely to occur when the ratio of consumption to inventory upper limit is small.