The integrated vehicle and pollster routing problem

Abstract The National Statistics Bureau of Ecuador conducts monthly price surveys to monitor the evolution of the Consumer Price Index, a metric that measures the consumer prices of essential commodities. These surveys are administered across a designated set of stores, with a fleet of vehicles transporting pollsters from the bureau headquarters to the chosen locations. Additionally, pollsters move between stores using walking paths or vehicles to reduce travel time. This paper introduces the Integrated Vehicle and Pollster Routing Problem and presents an integer programming model to effectively schedule pollster visits to selected stores while optimizing the routing of the vehicle fleet. A three-phase algorithm is proposed, and computational experience with real-world instances is presented.