Practical Approach for Finding Optimum Routes for Fuel Delivery Trucks in Large Cities

Abstract

Fuel truck dispatch between a bulk terminal and gas stations as distribution centers is vital in large cities. This dispatch is considered a vehicle routing problem (VRP), a well-known class of combinatorial optimization problems, and is difficult to solve. Instead of focusing on the VRP, this study provides a practical framework to find an optimal solution for the routing of a fuel delivery truck between a bulk terminal and a large number of stations supplied by it. First, six important criteria were proposed; they were believed to be necessary to consider for assessing safety and cost of different routes. Some ArcGIS tools were used to quantify these criteria—a difficult task, especially in large-scale transportation networks. Then a shortest path model based on a multicriteria objective was proposed to solve the routing problem and find the optimum routes between bulk terminal and fuel stations. The case study considered the Tehran, Iran, metropolitan area, with more than 12 million inhabitants, and solved the dispatching problem for two types of fuel: gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas. Scenarios were defined by considering different criteria for solving the routing problem. Then each scenario was evaluated on the basis of safety and economic indexes defined in this study. The findings show that using the proposed approach for solving the routing problem could improve the safety and economic indexes compared with the existing situation.