¹City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Correspondence: SCH Leung, P7701, Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong. E-mail: mssleung@cityu.edu.hk

Received November 2005; Accepted May 2007; Published online 25 July 2007.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a case study on a tanker assignment and routing problem for petrol products in Hong Kong. A fleet of heterogeneous dangerous goods vehicles has been assigned to deliver several types of petroleum products to petrol stations with different tank capacities. Under the vendor-managed inventory system, the delivery company is responsible for controlling the station's inventory and replenishment. The operational characteristics and challenges such as geographic zoning, size of petrol stations, routing restrictions and so on are unique and have been described in this paper. A decision support system (DSS) combining heuristic clustering and optimal routing is employed to find the optimal fleet assignment and routing. Multiple objectives are considered simultaneously such that the number of tankers used could be minimized, the number of drops in trips is minimized, profit in terms of total products delivered is maximized and utilization of resources is maximized. The case illustrates the benefit and advantages of using the proposed DSS.