Fuzzy Neighborhood Based Approach for Practical Delivery Problem

A solving method is proposed for the practical delivery problem by truck. In order to make easier the weight setting for each of the evaluation criteria presented in the evaluation function, an integrated evaluation criterion is proposed based on fuzzy neighborhood degree concept. Furthermore, with the objective to obtain a high-quality solution in short computational time, (i) a simulated annealing based method for finding a (sub-)optimal route for each vehicle; and (ii) an evolutionary computation based method for finding a (sub-)optimal schedule for a group of vehicles are proposed. The proposed method is implemented in C⁺⁺ language on a personal computer, and is evaluated on real-world data from a food company in Saitama prefecture, Japan. Compared to a scheduling expert, the proposed method has resulted in 18% lower delivery cost, with 80%-90% shorter computational time. The proposed methods is able to also be applied to other delivery problem such as home delivery services and mail delivery problems.