Efficacy in Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) Distribution in Urban Environments

Companies distributing LPG in cities used to have two kinds of customers: gas stations that sell it to final users and commercial consumers that use the gas in their own operations. They have to manage the inventory of gas and the daily schedule of the vehicles that transport the gas to the customers. The objective is to meet customer demand, but they are producing low average vehicle loads and empty vehicle kilometers. The authors present a short-term horizon tactical planning system that includes forecasting of sales in gas stations, lower and upper limits of the daily requirement in each customer, and a binary goal programming that determines the life cycle of each vehicle. The slack of the limits allows meeting a service level in the demands, while working with full loads in the vehicles. The system includes a scheduler for the first day and for each chain. It uses a clustering of customers for each vehicle reducing the GPS time network and a shortest path algorithm to determine the routes to visit each customer. The largest fuel distributor of Peru has implemented the system.