Using the Operations Research Methods to Address Distribution Tasks at a City Logistics Scale

Abstract

The manuscript discusses the overview and specification of the existing Operations Research methods for their implementation in terms of addressing distribution tasks, in particular to optimize delivery routes at a City logistics scale. First of all, a detailed literature review in a given context is elaborated, while the description of potentially relevant techniques to be applied is presented. The manuscript objective is to identify the most appropriate and benefit methods for their implementation to solve vehicle routing problem (hereinafter as VRP) at a City logistics scale and related optimization operations; i.e. to seek the shortest possible routes during the customer’s delivery activities. In this matter, it is important to state that relevant distribution (pick-up and delivery) tasks can be expressed in a form of graphs on specified transport networks, and thereby use the individual techniques of graph theory. The particular transport network, as the basic concept of transport theory, is defined as a finite set of vertices and edges representing the infrastructure of roads of a network. Each network must be coherent, i.e. there must be at least one path for each vertex pair connecting these two vertices. Each network edge as well as vertex is defined by a certain value or set of values, for example, the edge length, the time it takes to pass, the amount of work that needs to be done on the edge, etc.