Dynamic VRP in pharmaceutical distribution - a case study

• Autor(a) principal: José Miguel de Magalhães
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Outros Autores: Jorge Pinho de Sousa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.inesctec.pt/handle/123456789/3056

In recent years, the pharmaceutical sector has gone through deep changes, partially due to the ageing of the population and to the increasing of costs in health care services. With margins that are getting lower and lower, the drug distribution problem to pharmacies has become much more important, particularly in large metropolitan areas. As pharmacies demand shorter delivery times, vehicle routing and scheduling problems become harder for distributors. It is recognized that the traditional system based on fixed routes does not fulfil the expectations of pharmacies and may, in some cases, be quite inefficient for distributiors. In this work, a case study has been carried out and a change of the traditional approach is proposed, by adopting a system of variable routes that are dynamically designed, based on orders that are constantly arriving along the day. A dynamic algorithm is therefore proposed, meant to be run several times a day. It has four phases: first, a clustering of th