PATHFIND: Minimizing the Logistics Costs in Urban Centers

PATHFIND is the result of a partnership between private initiative and the academy of the Ceará State University to build a management tool in the logistics customer service area. Faced with the complexity of solving large-scale vehicle routing problems, PATHFIND presents a methodology that attempts to optimize the total response time of the integrated mathematical programming algorithms solutions inherent to the dispatch tasks involving: classification of physical delivery areas (clustering), enabled allocation of vehicles to these areas (assignment); vehicles routing (traveling salesman problem). PATHFIND is oriented to the real world solutions based on mathematical programming methodology. Most products’ distributor companies (such as beverages, food, cement, etc.) face daily situations in which they need to carry out around 1700 deliveries/day with a minimum waste. The paper presents a sample of a real situation in a region of the state of Bahia with 1763 deliveries in one specific day.