A HIERARCHICAL APPROACH TO MANAGING DAIRY ROUTING

We designed and implemented a decision support system to organize the delivery network for the products of a large dairy. To deal with this complex problem, we employed a five-level hierarchic structure distrib uting the clients among the sales promoters in the levels of greater a ggregation and assigning shops to individual drivers in the level with the greatest detail, which corresponds to a version of the traveling salesman problem with time windows. We implemented the model on a micr ocomputer, importing the necessary data from the company mainframe.