A Vehicle Routing Model For Postal Service Operations and an Application

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is a significant issue among companies. Efforts for cost reduction and production productivity are not enough for companies unless customer satisfaction is provided. For this reason, the aim of companies from all sizes is to provide the best and fastest service to customers. Therefore, the establishment and operation of a logistics network is important for a company from the original point to the point of arrival of a product or service.  In cargo companies transportation is the main procedure in terms of time and capacity constraints such as the number of vehicles, products and employees. With this aim, Vehicle Routing Problem with Backauls (VRPB) is investigated to reduce the total distance travelled by vehicles for a hypothetical postal service firm. It is assumed that there are more than a hundred center of the firm that send their vehicles to the reception centers after the distribution centers are visited. The P-Median clustering method is used based on the distances of the centers to each other, since the exact algorithms cannot solve this problem due to a great number of centers. Then, vehicles in each cluster routed by using a modified mathematical model. 

Keywords

• Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls,Clustering

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