A Spatial Decision Support System for Large Scale Vehicle Routing

Aiming at resolving the problems of how to route and schedule vehicles in logistics distribution, which has a characteristic of large scale vehicles scheduling question, a spatial decision support system (SDSS) architecture is designed to improve the efficiency and minimize transportation costs for the logistics distribution in this paper. A three-stage solution framework for large scale vehicle routing problem (LSVRP) is applied in the SDSS. Firstly, the large numbers of customers are merged according to their space attributes. Secondly, the merged customers are assigned to vehicles using a sweep algorithm. Thirdly, each vehicle route order is determined as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). With the solution framework, and by taking a logistics company of China as the case, the authors develop a decision support system. The practical application result shows that the system can reduce logistics costs and raise logistics efficiency for LSVRP.