Consistent vehicle routing with pickup decisions - Insights from sport academy training transfers

In professional team sports, clubs compete in a highly contested market for young talents. Especially in rural areas training transfer services are common to recruit promising underage players. If the demand for training transfers exceeds the available pickup capacities, a prioritization of pickups is necessary. Additionally, the transport of underage children has the special premises of consistent driver-player assignments. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present an algorithmic approach to passenger transportation problems with priorities under limited capacity and consistency requirements. We propose an iterative template-based procedure to handle the trade-off between priority maximizing pickups and assignment consistency. So far, the literature has focused on the consistent service of a predefined subset of customers. With our work we focus on the consistent service of all requesting customers. Consequently, the identification of promising template players is endogenous to our approach. We discuss the effect of template players on the service of non-template players and identify drivers of consistency. In addition, we provide a new Tabu Search neighborhood structure for heterogeneous vehicle routing under consistency, ensuring efficient vehicle deployment. We highlight the benefits of the approach by comparing our results with the routing solutions of a Bundesliga soccer club.