Proposal for a Hybrid Expert System and an Optimization Model for the Routing Problem in the Courier Services

Courier services consist generally in distributing packages or envelopes that are received daily for a set of customers geographically distributed through a fleet of vehicles. Thus, these services could be modeled as vehicle routing problem. The aim of this paper is to show an approach to solve this problem. We propose a three stage approached the first ones consist of scheduling, the second one is a clustering of customers, and the last one is a routing stage. Finally, we presented numerical results using a case study.