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| Author(s): |
Cláudia Pelizaro
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Carlos. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Engenharia de São Carlos (EESC/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2000-05-15 |
| Examining board members: |
Antonio Nelson Rodrigues da Silva;
Vitória Maria Miranda Pureza;
Joao Alexandre Widmer
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| Advisor: | Antonio Nelson Rodrigues da Silva |
| Abstract | |
The aim of this work is to evaluate a commercial computer program for vehicle routing. The software, named Delivery, has been designed to be a decision-support tool for planning goods collection and/or distribution. Its capacity for creating several alternative routes is very useful in the analysis of possible operational schemes before their actual implementation. A methodology for testing and evaluating the quality of the solution generated by the algorithm has been applied in this work, after a comprehensive literature review of the traditional vehicle routing and scheduling problems, their classification, and solution techniques and strategies. A field study in some companies that actually use a similar tool for routing their fleets has been carried out, in order to better understand how the activity is performed in real world conditions. The most important characteristics of commercial vehicle routing systems has been also identified in the field study, as well as the software used by the studied companies. Finally, a comparative empirical analysis with the software Delivery and TransCAD has been carried out. In order to compare them, test problems available in the literature, that correspond to some of the most common vehicle routing problems, and a real case application were employed. The results have shown that the heuristic of TransCAD had a better performance than the one used in Delivery. (AU) | |