Improving Vehicle Routing Decision for Travel Agency in Chonburi, Thailand

This paper focuses on vehicle routing decision, a real-world problem proposed by a travel agency company operating in Chonburi, Thailand. The objective is to minimize the total number of vehicles used and the total travelling distance. Currently, the company’s planners have to spend hours on manually planning with spreadsheet software. Therefore, the decision-making software was developed by using an approach based on golden ball algorithm to increase the efficiency of the route assignment and especially suitable for the practical use. Computational results on a set of benchmark problems show that the proposed approach is competitive when compared it with the best existing approaches in the literature. Moreover, when the proposed approach is applied to solve the company’s problems, the obtained solutions were able to significantly reduce the total number of vehicles used and the total travelling distance for supporting the planners’ decision.