Designing an Optimal Cafe Delivery Network Using Travelling Salesman Problem

The aim of this work is to design a delivery network for Coffee Café’s across the city using the travelling salesman problem so as to arrive at an optimal model. This will reduce the distance travelled by the delivery trucks and the associated costs incurred. Also, the number of trips taken by the delivery trucks should be reduced so as to accommodate emergency deliveries which are very much prevalent in the café chain business. The considered Coffee Café has two warehouses in the city of Bangalore. The mother warehouse caters to the “regional warehouses� located across the country and the city warehouse caters to café’s across the city. Though both cafes handle same type of material, only the city warehouse caters to the café’s in the city. This effectively means that a café located near the mother warehouse would still be served by the city warehouse. Hence this arrangement is not ideal and leads to unnecessary and extensive transportation costs. This work brings forward a proposal to break down the distribution model into two different networks with two different servers rather than one. We have made use of the Travelling Salesman Problem to find the optimal routes so that the new model is optimally and technically sound. Further we divided the café’s into two groups per warehouse (high and low demand cafes). The low demand cafes were served once in two weeks compared to the existing system thus reducing the number of trips taken.