Cesar Villacres Rosado

IP EXAM
(30%) What issues and difficulties in the corporate world are similar to those described in the case?
Mention at least one business scenario and explain (argument) your answer.

The situation or the problem that the school presents is very similar to that of a company in the logistics
part. For example, a textile factory that has to deliver its products to its customers (manufacturing
factories). They have to establish a route to deliver the fabrics to each of their customers. And the
vehicles they use don't always have the same capacity. Companies are always looking to minimize their
expenses and if they reduce the amount of fuel they consume, they are reducing their expenses.
Therefore, any company in general can apply a route model.

(40%) Assuming that the school decides that the vehicles are to be parked at the school premises
overnight (closed loop), how would a discrete optimization model help minimize the distance covered
by the vehicles? Don’t formulate a mathematical model; instead, in your own words, describe how the
model would look like and why it would help minimize the distance covered by the vehicles. Make
sure to consider in your answer all elements from an optimization model.

For this problem it would be useful to use a road model that includes several vehicles of different
capacities. The objective would be to minimize the total distance that vehicles travel to pick up students
and take them to school. In order to give students more time to do other activities. Given that in the city
most of the streets are two-way, it could be assumed that the distances between the nodes are
symmetrical. In addition, in the city there are no traffic problems in the hours that students must be
picked up, so by reducing the distance traveled by vehicles, time is also being reduced and, indirectly,
fuel consumption is also being reduced. For this reason, applying a route model would help solve the
problem presented by the school. The number of routes will be delimited by the number of vehicles that
the school has. And the decision variables would be which vehicle should be assigned to which route
and in what order. As restrictions we would have the capacity of the vehicles, which is different for each
one. Therefore, in order to assign a vehicle to a route, it must have a capacity greater than or equal to
the number of students on that route. The parameters that will be needed would be the distances
between each of the nodes and the capacities of each of the vehicles.

(30%) Assume that the institute hires one team to deliver invitations to parents for its annual
function. This situation can be solved as a TSP. What would be the shortest possible delivery route?
Use an heuristic to solve this problem. Make sure that your answer on the Word file includes the
route, distance, and heuristic used, with proper explanations of your answer. Attach the excel file
used to solve the problem, too.