A decision support system approach to milk tanker routing

Vehicle scheduling is concerned with the efficient routing of a fleet of vehicles that must visit, from a central depot, a collection of clients to perform some service. Milk tanker routing is an example, where milk tankers need to be assigned to dairy farms for collecting milk and transporting to factories for processing. Traditionally, vehicle scheduling scenarios have been modelled by operations researchers as mixed integer programs to be solved by advanced mathematical programming techniques. Although attempts have been made to create realistic models, experienced schedulers have often found them hard to use. In this paper, the authors present a decision support system (DSS) approach to the milk tanker routing scenario in the New Zealand dairy industry. The DSS is designed to help the transport managers of the dairy companies build the schedules using their experience and preferences.