A New MILP-based Decision Support System for the Fuel Distribution

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative web-based Decision Support System (DSS) for the fuel distribution to facilitate and to optimize de the daily delivery schedule. It integrates a new mathematical model into a supply chain management information system and a geographic information system. The studied problem refers to a complex delivery process of oil products from a distribution center to all the service stations, where products must be delivered under the time windows, using a set of vehicle with multiple compartments. This problem is modeled as a Multi-Compartment Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (MC-VRP-TW). We present a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and we use the optimization software CPLEX to solve it. In order to assess the performance of the proposed DSS, we conducted computational experiments on two real-world data of a Tunisian fuel company. Numerical results show the effectiveness of our decision support system.