A rescheduling framework for the customer visit scheduling problem of a salesperson

Abstract This study introduces a dynamic customer visit scheduling problem of a salesperson. The aim of the salesperson is to make frequent visits to the customers by prioritizing the customers with higher urgency levels. The urgency levels of the customers are subject to change depending on new information about their willingness to make a future purchase. The updated information about the customer urgency level is obtained by visiting the customer or by receiving an urgent call from the customer. To accommodate the changes in the customer urgency levels, the customer visits need to be rescheduled. In this regard, we propose a rescheduling framework for the problem. The proposed framework consists of two integer programming formulations, namely, scheduling and rescheduling models. The scheduling model generates a baseline customer visit schedule. The rescheduling model is employed to develop new customer visit schedule by considering the stability of certain visits. To control the timing of rescheduling decisions, we considered two alternative rescheduling policies, namely, periodic and event-driven rescheduling policies. An application of the proposed framework is presented on a case study of the customer visit scheduling in a vehicle manufacturer. The computational results reveal that the proposed framework with periodic rescheduling policy provides efficient visit schedules under the schedule stability constraints.