Article ID: | iaor2005938 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 55 |
Issue: | 11 |
Start Page Number: | 1137 |
End Page Number: | 1144 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2004 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Gll Refik, Kksalan M., Pamuk S. |
Keywords: | Turkey, geographical information systems |
We outline our analysis of the product delivery system of a major beer producer in Ankara, Turkey. We demonstrate a savings potential of up to 25% of distribution costs from the implementation of a number of suggested improvements, most notably that of reducing the number of weekly deliveries to a portion of the customers, and of constructing a geographical partitioning of the city that ensures a balanced distribution of the delivery workload over the days of the week. A geographic information system (GIS) is used to extract coordinate and distance information to be used in the partitioning and sequencing problem. A discussion of the difficulties involved in implementing a GIS project in Turkey is included.