The Vehicle-based Service Routing Problem

Vehicles can be considered as mobile platforms that enable the provision of public services like education, healthcare, or energy without stationary infrastructure. In particular, rural regions across sub-Saharan Africa demand for such flexible solutions as demand is scattered across vast regions, making investments in fixed facilities economically infeasible. Nevertheless, before entering a new region, vehicle fleet operators require an estimate of the costs in relation to the addressable demand to validate the investment case. This paper introduces a novel cost model for heterogeneous vehicle-based service systems. The proposed mixed integer programming problem considers strategic, tactical, and operational planning decisions that determine the cost of supplying a target area with a set of services provided by a fleet of vehicles. To test the proposed model, we apply it to a case study in Ethiopia for three public services. Based on the results, fleet operators gain insights into the fleet size, fleet mix, and associated operating costs.