THE DELIVERY PROBLEM

In the delivery problem we are required to find a minimum distance (cost) system of routes for a fleet of delivery vehicles. As inputs we are given the inter-customer travel times and the quantity of product which must be supplied to each customer. In this paper we review the various formulations wh...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Hayes,Robert L
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
Administration and Management
ALGORITHMS
CARGO VEHICLES
MANAGEMENT PLANNING AND CONTROL
MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING
Operations Research
OPTIMIZATION
SCHEDULING
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Summary:In the delivery problem we are required to find a minimum distance (cost) system of routes for a fleet of delivery vehicles. As inputs we are given the inter-customer travel times and the quantity of product which must be supplied to each customer. In this paper we review the various formulations which have been proposed for solving the problem and present two new approaches. The first is a branch and bound algorithm which, because of its rapid increase in computation time with an increase in problem size, can optimally solve problems having at most fifteen to twenty customers. The second formulation is a heuristic programming approach which is capable of solving much larger problems, but does not guarantee an optimal solution. The paper concludes with a chapter suggesting how these two methods might be modified so as to solve many of the common variations of the basic problem. (Author)