Disruption Management Model Of Demand Change In Urban Distribution System

Distribution is the last task when a company services customers. How to deliver the right products to customers at right time is the most important problem for distribution companies which focus on Milling customer satisfaction. In practice, there are numerous uncertainties such as changes in customer demand, changes in service time windows, vehicle breakdowns and so on which disable the initial distribution plan, leading to decreasing customer satisfactions. The way how to deal with disruption events effectively, which minimize disturbance resulting from disruption happening in distribution system, is the difficult problem in urban distribution management.Disruption management is a methodology that resolves this kind of problems in real-time. It is a multi-objective decision-making method that a new distribution plan should fulfill new goals and new constraints, as well as minimize the deviations from the original plan and achieve multi-party satisfaction when disruption events appear. This paper applies disruption management to demand changing problem which happens frequently in distribution system. The main researches are as follows:(1) On the basis of analyzing customer demand changing problem, the paper proposed the method of disturbance identification, researching on disturbance factors from the three actors of customers, drivers and distribution operators and constructed disturbance measurement function. Different criteria to measure systematic dissatisfactions are investigated according to operational goals in different distribution companies.(2)Based on Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, using the methods of measuring disturbance, a disruption management model for demand changing in distribution system is constructed.(3)Hybrid heuristic combined Tabu Search algorithm and Inserting algorithm to solve model is designed. When a disruption event appears, the initial distribution plan is optimized in real-time.(4)Applying the model and algorithm to a case, the result shows that the proposed model and algorithm are feasible and effective.The presented disruption management model for demand changing in distribution system is proved to be efficient in minimizing the impacts of disruption events. It reduces customer dissatisfactions and the rise of costs.