Evaluating Multi-Level Clustering Approaches to Route Sales Agents

The success of a product depends on marketing planning and the developed strategies to conquer the customer’s trust. Trade Marketing is one of the most used marketing strategies which supports periodic visits to the Points of Sale (POS) by sales agents. To succeed in this approach, it is vital to group POS into influence regions to cluster the consultants and promote the visiting routes. This paper proposes a multi-level clustering approach between POSs and sales agents to improve visiting scheduling performed by a routing algorithm. We performed some experiments using data from a real-world company. The results depict a substantial improvement in decreasing the routing algorithm’s runtime and better visiting routes.