CLUSTERING ALGORITHM FOR A VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS

IF 1.3 4区工程技术 Q3 TRANSPORTATION SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Transport Pub Date : 2022-05-02 DOI:10.3846/transport.2022.16850

T. D. Le, Duc Duy Nguyen, J. Oláh, M. Pakurár

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引用次数: 3

Abstract

The demand for daily food purchases has increased dramatically, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. This requires suppliers to face a huge and complex problem of delivering products that meet the needs of their customers on a daily basis. It also puts great pressure on managers on how to make day-to-day decisions quickly and efficiently to both satisfy customer requirements and satisfy capacity constraints. This study proposes a combination of the cluster-first –route-second method and k-means clustering algorithm to deal with a large Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) in the logistics and transportation field. The purpose of this research is to assist decision-makers to make quick and efficient decisions, based on optimal costs, the number of vehicles, delivery time, and truck capacity efficiency. A distribution system of perishable goods in Vietnam is used as a case study to illustrate the effectiveness of our mathematical model. In particular, perishable goods include fresh products of fish, chicken, beef, and pork. These products are packed in different sizes and transferred by vehicles with 1000 kg capacity. Besides, they are delivered from a depot to the main 39 customers of the company with arrival times following customers’ time window. All of the data are collected from a logistics company in Ho Chi Minh city (Vietnam). The result shows that the application of the clustering algorithm reduces the time for finding the optimal solutions. Especially, it only takes an average of 0.36 s to provide an optimal solution to a large Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with 39 nodes. In addition, the number of trucks, their operating costs, and their utilization are also shown fully. The logistics company needs 11 trucks to deliver their products to 39 customers. The utilization of each truck is more than 70%. This operation takes the total costs of 6586215.32 VND (Vietnamese Dong), of which, the transportation cost is 1086215.32 VND. This research mainly contributes an effective method for enterprises to quickly find the optimal solution to the problem of product supply.

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带时间窗车辆路径问题的聚类算法

日常食品采购需求大幅增加，特别是在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间。这就要求供应商每天交付满足客户需求的产品，这是一个巨大而复杂的问题。它也给管理人员带来了巨大的压力，要求他们如何快速有效地做出日常决策，既满足客户需求，又满足能力限制。针对物流运输领域的大型带时间窗车辆路径问题(VRPTW)，提出了一种将聚类优先-路线优先方法与k均值聚类算法相结合的方法。本研究的目的是协助决策者在最优成本、车辆数量、交货时间和卡车运力效率的基础上做出快速有效的决策。以越南的一个易腐货物配送系统为例，说明了我们的数学模型的有效性。特别是，易腐烂的货物包括新鲜的鱼、鸡、牛肉和猪肉。这些产品以不同的尺寸包装，由1000公斤的车辆运输。从仓库发货给公司的39个主要客户，到达时间按照客户的时间窗口。所有的数据都是从胡志明市(越南)的一家物流公司收集的。结果表明，聚类算法的应用减少了寻找最优解的时间。特别是对于有39个节点的大型车辆路由问题(Vehicle Routing Problem, VRP)，平均只需要0.36秒就能给出最优解。此外，卡车的数量，他们的运营成本，他们的利用率也充分显示。这家物流公司需要11辆卡车将他们的产品运送给39个客户。每辆卡车的利用率都在70%以上。本次操作的总费用为6586215.32越南盾，其中运输费用为1086215.32越南盾。本研究主要为企业快速找到产品供应问题的最优解提供了一种有效的方法。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Transport Engineering-Mechanical Engineering

CiteScore

3.40

自引率

5.90%

发文量

审稿时长

4 months

期刊介绍： At present, transport is one of the key branches playing a crucial role in the development of economy. Reliable and properly organized transport services are required for a professional performance of industry, construction and agriculture. The public mood and efficiency of work also largely depend on the valuable functions of a carefully chosen transport system. A steady increase in transportation is accompanied by growing demands for a higher quality of transport services and optimum efficiency of transport performance. Currently, joint efforts taken by the transport experts and governing institutions of the country are required to develop and enhance the performance of the national transport system conducting theoretical and empirical research. TRANSPORT is an international peer-reviewed journal covering main aspects of transport and providing a source of information for the engineer and the applied scientist. The journal TRANSPORT publishes articles in the fields of: transport policy; fundamentals of the transport system; technology for carrying passengers and freight using road, railway, inland waterways, sea and air transport; technology for multimodal transportation and logistics; loading technology; roads, railways; airports, ports, transport terminals; traffic safety and environment protection; design, manufacture and exploitation of motor vehicles; pipeline transport; transport energetics; fuels, lubricants and maintenance materials; teamwork of customs and transport; transport information technologies; transport economics and management; transport standards; transport educology and history, etc.