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ORTEC serves several industries where routing is a crucial part of the operations, such as retail, food and beverage delivery, and parcel delivery. Some organizations divide large geographical service areas into territories for drivers, technicians, or other employees before planning the routes for a particular day. This territory design is part of tactical planning and provides a basis for the later operational route planning. The territories should form recognizable and manageable areas and help employees become familiar with their regions and customers. For real-world cases involving up to hundreds of thousands of customers, creating good territories requires an optimization algorithm.
A good territory plan must meet several requirements. For example, the expected workload per territory should remain within configured bounds, territories should form geographically coherent areas without isolated parts, and customers within a territory should be clustered together. These considerations are represented as constraints and objectives in the optimization problem.
In practice, these requirements can conflict, making it difficult or even impossible to find a solution that satisfies all constraints. When no feasible solution has yet been found, an optimization heuristic must decide how to handle the remaining violations. Focusing too strongly on one violation may negatively affect other constraints or objectives and result in impractical territories. The optimizer should therefore handle violations in a way that supports the search for a feasible solution, while still producing a useful compromise if no feasible solution can be found.
The goal of this research is to investigate how constraint violations should be handled in territory optimization. This may include different ways of measuring, prioritizing, and resolving violations, as well as studying how violation handling affects the overall optimization process and solution quality.
# Research Questions
- What methods for handling constraint violations in optimization heuristics have been proposed in academic literature and previous research?
- How can different violations be balanced while maintaining the overall quality and practical usefulness of a solution?
- How does the handling of violations affect the heuristic’s ability to find a feasible solution?
- To what extent are the findings and insights applicable to other constraints and optimization problems?
Who you are:
• You are currently living in the Netherlands, studying at a Dutch University, and communicate fluently in Dutch or English, verbally and in writing;
• You are a master student in, Operations Research, Econometrics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science or another related field and looking for a graduation project;
• You are available for a minimum of six months to a maximum of nine months, ideally starting latest February 2027;
• You can travel to the office (in Zoetermeer) twice a week.
What we offer:
Entrance to the most passionate powerhouse in applied mathematics. We share a drive to use our problem-solving skills to improve our planet, from the world at large to our own backyard.
Inclusion in a company founded by graduate students back in 1981, which today still fosters its students by:
Excellent supervision during your graduation project;
Good internship allowance, laptop, and other office facilities;
An open, kind, and fun culture;
If you recognize yourself in this role, we are really keen to hear from you. Please upload both your CV and also your motivation letter and we will get back to you as soon as possible after your application.