A simulation-based method for evaluating the reliability of vehicle routing schemes in the vaccine delivery with vehicle breakdown

Abstract

This paper introduces the vehicle routing problem of the vaccine delivery with vehicle breakdowns. In the delivery process of vaccines, a continuous low-temperature environment is required. Once any event that causes the temperature to rise happens during the whole process, the quality of vaccines cannot be assured, and even human lives that are injected by the vaccines are threatened. Therefore, this paper presents a method to evaluate the reliability of vehicle routing schemes in the vaccine delivery with vehicle breakdown. The method adopts the simulation idea and supposes breakdowns at every fixed time interval for each vehicle. When a supposed vehicle breakdown happens, a saving-based heuristic will be applied to generate a rescue scheme. Finally, the method was coded and run on one of the classical CVRP instances.