An Empirical Study of Vehicle Routing Problem with Clustering Approach for Medical Consumable Materials Delivery

The present study aimed to improve the medical supply distribution routing. Repetition, delay, and cross-district sequence of delivery cause extra transportation cost. The distribution routing planning in home-delivery industry plays significant effects to the customer satisfaction and the total logistics costs. Therefore, it is important to have a well-designed distribution system for the home-delivery company to cope with its industry features and practical needs and to satisfy the marketing demand requirements. We proposed a clustering approach to improve the efficiency. We group all the points into several clusters, then routing the path. By allocating to the surrounding individual points separately, a distribution centre inside the hive-shaped formation can significantly shorten the distance and reduce the time. The goal of logistics is to provide high-quality service that meets the needs of end users. Therefore, routing optimization with clustering approach can help to improve the performance. The distribution distance can be reduced from 52 km to 29.4 km, i.e., 43.46 . The cost improvement in terms of time decreased from 130 minutes to 61 minutes, i.e., 53.08 . For problems such as errors in the manual entry of data and repeated replenishment, personnel education and training can be strengthened in the future, standard SOP can be implemented to reduce errors, and replenishment can also move towards better planning of supporting measures.