Effective Covering of Supplied Nanostores in Emerging Cities

Abstract

The role of distribution in emerging markets is the same as everywhere else. Yet the distribution landscape in such markets is marked by a lack of uniformity and dominated by traditional distribution channels made of nanostores. The traditional small retailers need to be visited and supplied very frequently (High Frequency Stores) which turns to be costly and time consuming. An effective and efficient distribution system allows customers to buy what they want whenever they want to. In this chapter, we deal with a real-life application problem where a Moroccan company has to build an effective strategy to supply nanostores in a major city like Casablanca. The problem of concern is modeled as an assignment problem, combined with side constraints regarding profit potential balance, workload balance and disruption of pre-assignments. We adopt a multi-objective approach to a multiple traveling salesman problem. The results show that the multi-objective function produces better profit and workload balance than setting a simple objective function and a constraint, one for the profit balance and the other for workload balance and vice-versa.