Study Of Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows Based On Customers Grouping

Distribution is a very important part of logistics system,which is not only the last link of goods from logistics center to customers,but also the most vulnerable link to cause delay. Reducing the customers' satisfaction could lead to the loss of customer amount. Nowadays,with the more and more complicated demand of logistics network, customers become increasingly sensitive to the time of delivery and speed,punctuality,services quality have been even more important to choose the vehicle route.Therefore,we need to select appropriate vehicle routes to speed up the response to customer demand, improve the service quality and enhance the customer satisfaction, in order to increase the enterprises competitivenes.Based on the related research work and the existing model, this paper considers time windows constraints of customer service,transportation costs and time effect costs more comprehensivly, so as to set the penalty function and establish the model of the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Then, the two-stage approach has been designed: in the first stage, in the consideration of customer satisfaction impact factors and the use of fuzzy clustering method,the paper adopts a fuzzy-system hybrid clustering method to analyze client characteristics from qualitative and quantitative aspects, thereby grouping the customers before selecting the vehicle route; in the second stage, the paper structures the optimal route for each group by using the genetic algorithm to solve the simplified model, and then achieves the work through Matlab genetic algorithm toolbox. Finally, this paper proves the effectiveness of model and solution to the vehicle routing problem with time windows through the actual case.