Vehicle rerouting in the case of unexpectedly high demand in distribution systems

•Many logistics companies use the same vehicle routes every day.•Unexpectedly high demand can cause that some vehicle routes are not feasible any more.•We proposed a model to minimize the negative consequences of the disturbances.•We proposed the Bee Colony Optimization algorithm to solve the problem.•We tested the proposed concept on the Solomon’s benchmark example. Many logistics companies use the same vehicle routes every day when distributing goods to the customers. Unexpectedly high demand in some nodes can cause that one or more of the planned vehicle routes are not feasible any more. In such a situation, the new set of vehicle routes should be generated. We propose in this paper the mathematical formulation of this problem. We also propose the Bee Colony Optimization algorithm and principles of lexicographic optimization to solve the problem. When solving the described problem we tried to minimize the negative consequences of the disturbances caused by the increased customer demand. We tested the proposed concept on the Solomon’s benchmark example. The obtained results show that Bee Colony Optimization metaheuristic can find high quality solutions in reasonable CPU time.