Minimizing the transportation cost of Dambulla economic centre: integration of process planning and scheduling on a web base platform

Abstract

The government of Sri Lanka established economic centres in provinces according to the budget proposals in the year 1998. The Dambulla Economic Centre was the first and was established on the 01ˢᵗ of April 1999. Thereafter, a number of economic centres were established throughout the island. But Dambulla Main Hub remained the central warehouse of vegetables in the island. This paper deals with a vehicle scheduling problem in transportation and investigates a solution to overcome the problem using linear programming (LP).

Marketing Department Logistics (MDL) Ltd needs to distribute vegetables and fruits to different provinces. Its main hub is situated near the Dambulla vegetable and fruit market, and minor hubs are situated in different provinces in Sri Lanka. The main objective of this research is building a cost minimization model to create a suitable method for delivering of vegetables and fruits from the Dambulla major hub through its minor hubs to the outlets in the provinces. Hence, to optimize the cost of outbound distribution, a mathematical model has been developed by using Integer Linear Programming using reliable sources to collect data. Software assistance was obtained using the Lingo 06 optimizer, Java, Ms Access and Ms Excel tools to solve this mathematical model. This study is based on the Dambulla economic centre. This is an initial step to bring a correct protocol to arrange a transport model to distribute the vegetables and fruits from this centre in a cost-effective way. According this study all districts in Sri Lanka could be divided into four clusters.

At the beginning of this research we assumed that each district contains two warehouses and three vendors. This model is flexible enough to re-schedule for any given request. It helps to create a larger model for solving any type of transportation planning problem.