A Decision Support System approach for the postal delivery operations

The research aims at developing a Decision Support System (DSS) devoted to manage Postal Delivery Systems (PDSs). In particular, the complex structure of the PDS is analyzed by the Unified Modeling Language diagrams and the main decisions necessary to manage the system are enlightened. Moreover, we focus on the operations of the Postal Automation Centers that are the core of the PDS and have charge the distribution of the outgoing mail to the borough Postal Delivery Centers. Among the decision problems of the Postal Automation Center we focus on the vehicle routing problem. An integer programming formulation is proposed and a real case study of the Italian postal network is solved by a heuristic algorithm.