Abstract

SUAREZ, Luis et al. Towards more efficient delivery routes. A virtual store case study. Rev cuba cienc informat [online]. 2021, vol.15, n.4, suppl.1, pp. 86-100.  Epub Dec 01, 2021. ISSN 2227-1899.

Most situations involving a distribution chain can be modeled as a Vehicle Routing Problem. The past few years virtual stores have gained a lot of popularity in Cuba, specially the platform TuEnvio. Currently, the platform lacks a system to optimize delivery routes for a large number of clients. To solve this Vehicle Rou- ting Problem, a mix of Capacitated p-Median problem and the Traveling Salesman Problem is proposed. To solve large instances of the Vehicle Routing Problem, three instance decomposition strategies are proposed. The solution method consists in dividing a large instances of the problem into smaller sub-instances using the geographic information of the nodes. Each sub-instance is then solved clustering all nodes in their correspon- ding route solving the Capacitated P-Median problem through Iterated Local Search. The sequence of each node in their corresponding route is determined by solving the TSP using the Farthest Insertion heuristic. The proposed solution is applied to a case study in the context of package delivery of the virtual store TuEnvio, in Havana, Cuba. The obtained results indicate that dividing the original instance by municipalities results in smaller routes, but decomposing the instances by recursively solving the P-Median problem to determine the sub-instances takes considerably less computational effort and obtains routes of acceptable length.

Keywords : Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem; P-Median Problem; Instance decomposition.

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