A Vehicle Routing Problem Arising in the Distribution of Higher Education Institutions Exam Booklets

Abstract

In this paper, the exam booklet distribution plan for the Higher Education Institutions Exam (HEIE) is studied. The exam booklets distribution should be considered as capacitated vehicle routing problem (VRP). There are vehicles with a certain capacity that are carrying exam boxes and schools where exams are held. Every school has a demand for exam boxes. Therefore, the problem is minimizing the cost/distance of distribution from the depot where exam booklets are kept to the schools with capacitated vehicles. The case of Gaziantep city with 135 nodes (one depot and 134 schools) is considered. To model and solve the problem, a mixed integer programming (MIP) model is developed and applied. Due to the large size of the problem, the VRP tool of Esri ArcGIS (well-known geographic information system (GIS) software) and OR-tool of Google are also applied to get an acceptable solution in a reasonable time. Finally, the proposed three distribution plans are compared to each other and the results are discussed. Our numerical results show that the tools of Esri ArcGIS and OR-tool of Google decrease the total route distance by 8.21% and 3.02% compared to the MIP model, respectively.