A Two-Phase Approach to Evaluate and Optimize an Interlibrary Loan Service: The Case Study of Provincia di Brescia

We analyze the case study of Provincia di Brescia, an Italian public body managing libraries in the province of Brescia, in Northern Italy. The public body offers an interlibrary loan service organized as follows. Libraries are divided into established groups, each associated with a fixed route. According to a predetermined calendar, each library is visited by a courier a few times a week. The transportation of the items in the network is performed by an external logistics firm, selected through a reverse auction. To assess the current implementation of the service in terms of routing and transportation costs, we propose a two-phase approach based on machine learning and mixed-integer linear programming, and we evaluate it on the data of 2019. Then, we discuss its applicability in reality, and provide a few insights.