Abstract
Postal operator, as well as every network enterprise, needs to keep its costs on the lowest level possible, while maintaining the reliability and availability of its services. One option to the costs is to optimize the transport network. This article focuses on the creation of postal network based on existing road infrastructure in Slovakia. Except the basic analysis of the infrastructure, the research approach adopted in this article relies on methods of graph theory to solve allocation problems. In particular, it is the method of p-median values and its algorithms to determine the number and location of new postal sorting centers. The findings showed that the analysis performed is just the cornerstone in finding the optimal solution for such strategic investments. Results are bounded to the input values used, especially the distance of the network vertices. Specific values of postal sector need to be incorporated with more thorough analysis of road infrastructure, considering future development of transport network.
Highlights
Postal operation represents an extensive technological system with a considerable degree of integration for different types of services
We decided not to take into account the existing postal network, but we are dealing with the idea of creating a new network based on the existing transport infrastructure
The results can serve in understanding the issue of interconnection between creating postal networks and the use of allocation theory for their optimization
Summary
Postal operation represents an extensive technological system with a considerable degree of integration for different types of services. Models, based on the total, or covering distance seem to be the most appropriate for the issue addressed in this article When locating facilities, these models do not take into account the maximum distance between the facility and demand node, but rather the total/average distance between the facilities and all demands. We decided to use the p-median allocation model The goal of this model is to find the location of P facilities in the network, ensuring to serve all the demands and to minimize the average transport costs (Daskin, 2010). These costs can be determined by multiplying the demands of network node and the distance between a node and the closest facility serving its demands. Since the myopic algorithm finds the very first appropriate solution and does not try to optimize it, we use the neighborhood search algorithm (Figure 1)
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