Decision Support System for Facility Location Problems in Fleet Management

João Martins, Goreti Marreiros, Carlos Abreu Ferreira

Abstract: Businesses that are growing by supplying more services or reaching more customers, might need to create or relocate a facility location to expand their geographical coverage and improve their services. This decision is complex, and it is crucial to analyse their client locations, their journeys and be aware of the factors that may affect their geographical decision and the impact that they can have in the business strategy. Therefore, the decision-maker needs to ensure that the location is the most profitable site according to the business scope and future perspectives. In this paper, we propose a decision support system to help businesses on this complex decision that is capable of providing facility location suggestions based on their journeys analysis and the factors that the decision-makers consider more relevant to the company. The system helps the business managers to make better decisions by returning facility locations that have potential to maximise the company’s profit by reducing costs and maximise the number of covered customers by expanding their territorial coverage. To verify and validate the decision support system, a system evaluation was developed. Thus, a survey was responded by decision-makers in order to evaluate the efficiency, understandability, accuracy and effectiveness of the suggestions.