Decision Support System for Open Vehicle Routing With Transhipments and Stopovers

Abstract

Transshipments and stopovers are considered to be an effective method to reduce traveling distance where a transportation job can be served by two vehicles: One picks up a load and drops it at a transshipment point and then another vehicle carries that load to the final delivery place. The goal of this study is to develop a decision support system for open vehicle routing with transshipments and stopovers. We propose a heuristic to find transshipments and stopovers opportunities from an initial routing. Decision methods consist of four main processes: (1) Searching jobs that allow transshipment opportunity, (2) searching paths that allow transshipment opportunity, (3) matching paths and (4) selecting jobs to create new paths with transshipment. The output is the improved routing with transshipments and stopovers, resulting lower total costs. From computational experiments, our proposed method could reduce the system's total cost up to 12.42 percent as compared to the typical routing without transshipments and stopovers. We design system database and user interfaces, considering all input requirement entering and result displays that are easily used, so that the system can be effectively applied in actual working environments.