Developing financially beneficial and effective distribution and loading plans for products is often a difficult task for many companies. In many cases, planners must take into account requirements regarding route planning, delivery deadlines, technical capabilities of the transport fleet, and many other legislative requirements and rules of cooperation between the supplier and recipients. In most cases, companies plan their operations based on the experience of their employees. With the constantly rising costs of goods distribution, the question arises whether manual methods or others currently in use are the right ones used by the company?
Progress in automatic distribution planning techniques
It is generally estimated that transport costs most often fall between one-third and two-thirds of total logistics costs. Even a few percent improvement in the quality of a distribution plan or the development of a near-optimal plan in a short time can bring measurable savings for the company on an annual scale.
The first work on analyzing the traveling salesman problem was started by Karl Menger in 1930. The first successful program calculating the optimal traveling salesman route was developed in 1954 by G. Dantzig, R. Fulkerson, and S. Johnson for 49 cities. It was not until 1975 that P.M. Cameron and L. Fratta calculated the optimal traveling salesman route for 100 cities. Work on approximate route planning algorithms has shown their significantly greater speed in finding a near-optimal solution.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 6/2004.