Abstract

Traditional approach of ad-hoc geocoding for required addresses is quite time consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we propose and examine that the company-wide operations and addresses be geo-coded and stored in a database. As a case study, a geographical database is created for a company with primary focus to optimize operations management. This is done by storing the address information, the road network and a matrix containing time and distances to every address in the database. This approach prevents a lot of potential errors with ad hoc geocoding because every address is looked up in the database. The same goes for the time and distance matrix. Because the time and distances are stored for the distance between every address, no computations are needed at runtime. Results demonstrated that the proposed method improved the overall time taken starting from registration of an address to geocoding by 50%. When a route is prepared, only a TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem) algorithm is applied to the required addresses for the route optimization. The proposed method is proven to be very effective to a small and medium size
company in supply chain logistics.