Optimization of vehicle routing: A case of arts in business administration
Abstract
Tho Phat Company is a processing food company. The increasing number of
customers makes the distribution decision more complex. As a result, the transportation
cost is increasing and vehicles take longer time than necessary to deliver goods. There are
needs of methods to help the distribution manager make decision that would minimize
transportation cost as well as satisfy customers’ requirement. This thesis presents a
research on the Vehicle Routing Problem using a sweep heuristic method and an integer
programming model for vehicle routing problem with time window model to select the
best route to delivery product to customers. The model is built to resolve cases that have
difference in time window between two groups of customers. Likewise other optimized
model limitation, the proposed integer programming model can solve effectively cases of
a small number of customers. To overcome that limitation, this paper proposes clustering
nodes first by using sweeping method. This phase aims to form sets of cluster that each
satisfies the vehicle’s capacity while the second phase finds optimal sequence of nodes
within these clusters. The results showed that the proposed model in this study yields less
traveling distance than the performance of the company by 14.23%. Finally,
recommendations instructing the implementation of the model into the company are
provided.