The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 1996–1999
Sears fused GIS with vehicle routing to dispatch service and delivery
Sears linked geographic maps to a routing optimizer for service crews and deliveries, saving $42m a year.
Sears, Roebuck and Company
the move
Sears runs a large technician-dispatching and home-delivery business, and its routing problems — vehicles with time windows serving many customers a day — were both huge and practically hard, not just theoretically interesting.
The team built a vehicle-routing-and-scheduling system on a geographic information system, with algorithms that construct the origin-and-destination travel matrix, assign resources and then sequence and improve routes, so the optimizer reads real drive times off the map.
The combined GIS and OR system improved the technician and delivery operation, yielding over $9 million in one-time savings and over $42 million in annual savings.
why it works
- Drive time, not straight-line distance, decides whether a route works.
- A routing model disconnected from the map could not be used for dispatch.
- The GIS supplies the travel matrix the optimizer needs to assign routes.
- Measured: over $9m one-time and over $42m in annual savings.
what transfers
When a route problem fails because the geography is hard to get, put the map inside the optimizer so travel times and routes share one source; the data problem can outweigh the algorithm.
what came after
The system ran Sears' delivery and home-service fleets more efficiently and pointed to a link between geographic information systems and operations research; it was a Franz Edelman Award finalist project.
references
- Applying GIS and OR Techniques to Solve Sears Technician-Dispatching and Home-Delivery Problems
- Applying GIS and OR Techniques to Solve Sears Technician-Dispatching and Home-Delivery Problems
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