An Iterative Two-Step Approach to Area Delineation

Abstract

Recent advances of e-commerce development require the timely delivery of goods. Amongst many challenges to deal with, a logistics company should effectively delineate a service area for vehicles or persons to deliver goods or services to the clients with the minimal overall travel costs while balancing their workloads. Each service area contains a certain number of clients to be serviced, and the problem to be solved here is basically a spatial clustering one. However, most existing clustering methods usually ignore the objective of balancing workloads among clusters. This paper introduces an approach attempting to partition a service area effectively. The objectives of the problem include generating spatially continuous and mutually exclusive clusters (subareas), minimizing the travel distance, and balancing the workloads among clusters. A series of experiments are conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Based on the benchmarks it appears that the proposed approach performs better with respect to the above three objectives.