Strategic Planning and Vehicle Routing Algorithm for Newspaper Delivery Problem : Case study of Morning Newspaper , Bangkok , Thailand

of its variants, the vehicle routing problem with Time window (VRPTW) is studied. In the vehicle routing problem, a set of vehicles with limited capacity, are to be routed from a central depot to a set of geographically dispersed customers with known demands and predefined time windows. The VRPTW is NP-hard and best solved to optimum or near optimum is heuristic, so to solve this NP-hard vehicle problem Sweep Algorithm is developed. Our research aims to examine distribution problem of a morning newspaper and to minimize the total cost without violating the capacity and time window constraints. The problems consist of vehicle departure times, the routing of vehicles, the location of distribution centers and drop-off points and allocating drop-off points to distribution centers. Results provide evidence of the dramatic impact on costs achieved by developing routing and dispatching schedule simultaneously.

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