A DSS based on GIS and Tabu search for solving the CVRP: The Tunisian case

The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a well known optimization problem applied in numerous applications. It consists of delivering items to some geographically dispersed customers using a set of vehicles operating from a single depot. As the CVRP is known to be NP-hard, approximate methods perform well when generating promising sub-optimal solutions in a reasonable computation time. In this paper, we develop a Decision Support System (DSS) for solving the CVRP that integrates a Geographical Information System (GIS) enriched by a Tabu search (TS) module. In order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed DSS in terms of CPU runtime and minimized traveled distance, we apply it on a large-sized real case. The results are then highlighted in a cartographic format using Google Maps.