A Simulation Based Vehicle Distribution Planning System

Many vehicle routing methods have been suggested, which minimize the routing distances of vehicles to reduce the total transportation cost. But the more considerations the method takes, the higher complexites are involved in a large number of practical situations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a vehicle distribution planning system using heuristic algorithms and simulation techniques for home electronics companies. The vehicle distribution planning system developed by this study involve so complicated and stochastic conditions such as one depot, multiple nodes(demand points), multiple vehicle types, multiple order items, and other many restrictions for operating vehicles. The proposed system is compared with the nearest neighbor method and the savings method in terms of total logistics cost and driving time. This heuristic algorithm and simulation based distribution planning system is efficient in computational complexity, and give improved solutions with respect to the cost as well as the time. This method constructs a route with a minimum number of vehicles for a given demand.