Towards a Decision Making Support System for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Distribution of goods is of importance in logistics and supply chain management. The target of a distribution network is to specify the beneficial way for delivering goods and commodities from supply to demand points. In distribution domain, this activity can usually be viewed as a capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). As the CVRP solutions remain computationally intractable, we develop in this paper an interactive routing decision making support system (R-DMSS) that integrates a swarm based approach into a geographical information system (GIS). The empirical experiments include benchmarking instances as well as a case study over the Ezzahra area in Tunisia. The R-DMSS interfaces are presented to better understand the operational aspect of the system.