A routing vehicles model for the delivery of furniture and home appliances of a retail company in southern Brazil

Logistics has been recognized one of the key elements of the competitive strategy of companies including the supply of products and services from a supply point to a demand point. In retail market, companies’ net income is usually low and the expenses with distribution are relevant in the composition of logistic costs. In addition, there are challenges in the distribution of products such as high customer churn, requirement of specific delivery times and high product variability. This paper proposes a model of routing that aims to reduce costs of transportation of companies in the distribution of products, having as a base, a network of stores of furniture and home appliances in the south of Santa Catarina state, in southern Brazil. By combining Clarke and Wright heuristic with own developed heuristics, a computational system has been implemented so that routes considering truck driver work days, truck load capacity and time interval for consumer delivery can be found in acceptable computation time. Obtained solutions with the routing tool were nearly 1% above the optimal solutions obtained by enumeration, showing that the model leads to good results, i.e., reducing trucks travel time by low computational effort.