A Flower Transportation-Distribution System

This paper describes a case-study concerning a transportation-distribution system for the world's largest flower auction in Holland. Each day, 4–8 million flowers are sold in 4 hr in approximately 20,000 transactions, each consisting of 1–250 bunches or boxes of flowers. The transactions are distributed over more than 1000 dealers. The stochastic character and the composition of the output of the auction process make it difficult to design a good transportation-distribution system. A newly implemented semi-automatic transportation system was taken out of use after only 2 weeks of operation.The operational research study shed considerable light on what was going wrong, and suggested a number of useful lines of further investigation.