A Hierarchical Approach to Managing Dairy Routing

Abstract

We designed and implemented a decision support system to organize the delivery network for the products of a large dairy. To deal with this complex problem, we employed a five-level hierarchic structure distributing the clients among the sales promoters in the levels of greater aggregation and assigning shops to individual drivers in the level with the greatest detail, which corresponds to a version of the traveling salesman problem with time windows. We implemented the model on a microcomputer, importing the necessary data from the company mainframe.