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Asim, Muhammad (2008) Vehicle Routing and the Value of Postponement. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Industrial wisdom presumes that postponing the collection (or delivery) services reduces the transportation cost & most of the studies conducted in practical scenarios also substantiate this belief. However there is a dearth of in-depth research assessing the value of postponement in vehicle routing context. This research aims to explore the significance of postponement & its inter-relationship with related problem parameters such as vehicle capacity, clients' density, location of clients & depot, clients' demand, postponement level etc.

For different routing environments, several problem instances are generated in excel. Computational results are achieved by running the instances using a local search algorithm. Finally a graphical analysis of results is done to investigate the impact of postponement on routing efficiency & sensitivities in key problem parameters.

Computational results demonstrate that postponement is a good strategy to reduce the transportation cost. Moreover benefits of postponement increases when the postponement interval is higher, when the vehicle capacity increases, when the items are less bulky (i.e. bin packing is easy), when the client density is lower and when the depot is more centrally located in the distribution area. However the improvement in routing over no postponement becomes worst under reverse conditions.

Item Type:	Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Depositing User:	EP, Services
Date Deposited:	27 Nov 2008
Last Modified:	09 Jan 2018 20:14
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/22516

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