Development on Vehicle Routing Problem Program: A Case Study of a Transportation Service Provider

Abstract

This research aims to develop a computer program for scheduling the delivery routes for the number of trucks owned by a food supply company. The company's customers are located in Bangkok and nearby provinces. This target is to find out the shortest routes possible. Google Map technology was utilized to locate each customers and to create a precise delivery trucks’ route map. We chose to adopt the Nearest Neighbor Heuristics (NNH) concept of the Heuristics so-called theory in order to get the best solution for the Travelling Salesman problem (TSP) and the Vehicle Routing problem. By analyzing the data through our program developed on Visual Basic for Application (VBA) and Microsoft Excel, it is discovered that the distance of the new route generated by TSP-NNH method is decreased by 11.79 percent comparing with the current one. For VRP-NHH method, the new routes from 2-opt and 3-opt could reduce the total distance by 6.13 percent and 12.89 percent accordingly.     It is proven that the computer program developed could assist the company to manage their delivery trucks’ routing system more effectively and efficiently.