A Decision Support System for Teaching Vehicle Routing

Abstract

E-commerce consumer habits change has revolutionized the supply chains worldwide. Special attention has been drawn to last mile operations since typically it is the most expensive part of logistics. This requires that professionals, and specially students, are properly trained to solve more complex problems, like vehicle routing to perform home deliveries. Solution methods to this problem require a set of skills which not all bachelor programs develop in students, making the teaching-learning process more difficult. As a strategy to provide students more resources that foster the necessary competences, a decision support system is developed in this project and evaluated in terms of the student perception of the application of theory to solve real-life situations. The proposed system requires no coding skills and provides near to optimal solutions in reasonable amount of time. Results indicate the use of aiding teaching tools improve learning; however careful selection of complementary tools is needed to maximize the understanding of theory in practice.