Automated Data Acquisition for a Large Scale Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract This paper presents an Automated Data Acquisition (ADA) procedure for a Large Scale Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). The problem is finding optimal routes for the Personnel Transport in a manufacturing enterprise from the Mexican automotive cluster. As in every CVRP, the amount of data grows exponentially, which makes very difficult collecting data. A three route example problem was solved; a small scale model with 27 nodes yielded 729 pairs, a medium scale model with 244 nodes yielded 59,292 pairs, and a full scale model with 728 nodes produced a matrix of 529,256 pairs. Data collection about traveling times between each pair was needed, so an Automated Data Acquisition software to obtain them was developed. The software connected to a Geographical Information System GIS with every possible path between each pair of locations. The data matrix for the medium and large scale models was acquired, and can be used as a foundation for future research. An example problem was solved using linear programming methods. The solution obtained for the small scale model was a traveling time reduction of 30%, respect to the manufacturing enterprise empirical solution.