Module 5 - Special Topics in GIS - Vehicle Routing Problems

16 Truck Routes with Orders for Southern Florida

This week's lab in Special Topics was a continuation of Network Analysis.  In these exercises, we worked on establishing routes for vans delivering patients to their doctor appointments, and for trucks delivering goods to supermarkets.

In the map on the left, we can see the routes for 16 trucks from the depot or warehouse, to various stores, as they deliver their orders over the course of a day.   Initially, we restricted the trucks to delivering only within their own zones, and excluded any other trucks from delivering to zones not assigned to them. There are 14 zones, and one truck was assigned exclusively to each zone in that scenario (14 trucks total).
This resulted in 6 orders being missed in the day's deliveries, and 10 additional orders for which the established time schedule was violated.


We then developed a new scenario (pictured here), in which we added two additional trucks from the fleet of 22 to be assigned to help with deliveries to the zones.  In this case, no orders were missed, and only one order was late.  In the figure above, blue dots are order deliveries that were delivered successfully, within their time constraints, and the red square is the solitary order that was delivered outside the time window.  The numbers in parentheses after each truck number are the quantities of orders assigned for each route.

Difference in revenue from the first solution (14 trucks) to the second solution (16 trucks):
$33,625 (16) - $32,000 (14) = $1,625 more was earned with new, 16-truck solution.
Difference in cost from first solution to second solution:
16,919.63(16) - $15,067.20 (14) = $1,852.43 more cost was
incurred with new, 16-truck solution.
So, the company had a net cost increase of about $227, but that resulted
in better customer service (6 orders filled that otherwise would not have been),
 which will be better for the company in the long run.