Solving The Oil Delivery Trucks Routing Problem with Modify Multi-Traveling Salesman Problem Approach Case Study: The SME's Oil Logistic Company in Bangkok, Thailand

This research work provides the approach for solving the oil delivery trucks routing problem by using multi-traveling salesman problem (MTSP) solving method with this research created algorithm. The created algorithm is used to modify the problem data format by transforming a traditional problem data form of a node-arc network routing problems to become a job sequencing and scheduling problems, which can be solved by traveling salesman problem (TSP) for a single truck logistic system or multitraveling salesman problem (MTSP) for several trucks logistic system. This original problem data and configuration are the everyday operating procedure of one SME’s oil logistic company in Bangkok. Originally, this company accomplishes customer orders of oil delivery from an oil refinery warehouse to the specific customer local gas stations in Bangkok area by using first come first serve policy with two oil delivery trucks that can not satisfy today business competitiveness because of high logistic cost. According to this problem, this research provides the heuristic approach to solve the company problem, showing by a small simulated example problem on this paper. The answer from created heuristic is a TSP tour for each truck that examines the sequencing of order for all trucks. Computation time of this heuristic model for small number of node problem is fast, but it may take a lot more time as combinatorial nature of TSP when the number of node is growing up. The solution is not guarantee optimality of shortest track traveling distance but can be a good lower bound that provides much logistic cost saving for a case study company.