Study On Vehicle Routing Problems Of Fashion Industry Based On Time-Satisfaction Degree

The ideological line of "emancipating the mind and seeking truth from facts" proposed in the Third Plenum in 1978 makes Chinese fashion start to recover,which has imprisoned Chinese people for ten years.It changed the old dress uniform situation during the period of Cultural Revolution.The reform and opening-up policy made China open the door to the world, and then the Western style of clothes poured into our country.The "fashion" entered the world of the Chinese people, especially the world of Chinese women. In the Middle of 1980s, great changes have occurred in Chinese fashion industry.However,in the early 1990s, Chinese women were not only content to catch up with the trend, but also started to pursuit personality. People's popular psychology changed from conservation to openness, from blind obedience to the pursuit of personality. These changes gradually shorten the life cycle of clothing. To meet the individual needs of consumers,companies chose to produce in small quantities but in various styles. The retailer's demand of each style of clothes is so little that it is impossible for the manufactures to distribute goods to each of them. In fact,the manufacturers always concentrate the products in a wholesale center,then the products are distributed to each retailer by the wholesale center.However, the management of wholesale center is chaotic due to capital, size and other issues,The business philosophy that " production is prior to logistics" is deeply rooted, as a result, the level of logistics and distribution is very low.They always develop vehicle scheduling programs based on experience instead of using quantitative method.Research on vehicle scheduling has existed for decades and the theory is relatively mature.But most of the existing study is pure algorithm or general distribution model.The selected targets are single (the shortest delivery time, the shortest path, the lowest costs of distribution and transportation, etc.) and the algorithm is also complicated.There is seldom specific research according to the features of the fashion industry.If the existing results are applied to the distribution of fashion industry,there will be many problems.For example,the computing time is too long, the algorithm complexity is too high, or the delivery time requirements are not taken into account and so on.As a result, the distribution costs is possiblly even higher than that caused by the light of experienc .This paper tries to establish a realistic model in the view of time-satisfaction, according to the character of time-sensitive of fashion industry.The model takes into account both the minimization of transportation costs and the maximization of time-satisfaction degree. And different weights are given to different goals according to customers'characteristics, so that the cost and satisfaction can reach equilibrium.To make the model represented easily, this sduty converted the goal of maximizing satisfaction of time into the goal of minimum time penalty through establishing a conversion function, then the objective function is minimum .Finally ,the operability of the model is verified through a case. In the case study, the savings algorithm was used.The results of the study may be helpful for the Garment Factories in Towns to develop vehicle scheduling programs.