NANO-STORE RETAILERS’ DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM MANAGEMENT IN EMERGING COUNTRIES

Emerging megacities are still abounded with traditional distribution channels. These retail formats need to be visited and supplied very frequently, which turns to be costly and time consuming. In this paper, we address an optimization problem for supplying nanostores (or high frequency stores), while combining districting problem and an altered traveling salesman problem. We present a reallife case study where a company tries to build an effective strategy to cover and supply its nanostores’ network. The problem of concern is modeled as an assignment problem, combined with side constraints regarding disruption of pre-assignments and profit potential balance. The results show that the objective function gives better solution when it’s a combination of both profit and workload balance.