DELIVERY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM USING THE CLUSTERING BASED MULTIPLE ANT COLONY ALGORITHM: KOREAN HOME APPLIANCE DELIVERY

Abstract

This paper deals with the heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time windows (HFVRPTW) in the area of Korean home appliance delivery. The suppliers of modern home appliance products in Korea not only have to provide the traditional service of simply delivering goods to customers within the promised time, but they also need to perform additional services such as installation of the product and explanation of the products functions. Therefore, businesses reducing the delivery cost while improving the quality of the service experienced by customers is an important issue. In order to meet these two demands, we generated a delivery schedule by using a heuristic clustering-based multiple ant colony system (MACS) algorithm. In addition, to improve service quality, we set up an expert system composed of a manager system and an android-based driver system. The system was tested for home appliance delivery in Korea. This paper is significant in that it constructs an expert system for the entire process of distribution, from the generation of an actual schedule to management system setup.