Santa needs to design last-mile transportation routes to deliver presents all over the world. In this post, we’ll focus on the 200 largest cities in France.  

Santa has two types of transportation assets available to him:  

• Sleighs that can carry large amount of presents but are quite slow, by magical standards anyway – maxing out at 300kph (186mph), which is roughly the speed of the French high speed train TGV.  
• Elves that can only carry one present at a time but are able to teleport anywhere in the country instantaneously, however they require a hefty payment for each trip.  

Presents must be delivered within the night of December 24th (seven-hour time window) so elves might seem like the best option, but they don’t work for free! Santa wonders what the minimum number of elves is he will need to deliver all presents on time.  

Hopper Transportation Route Optimization is the newest engine available in the Cosmic Frog supply chain design solution and allows users to optimize their outbound last mile delivery routes and establish what fleet mix should be used. This is exactly what Santa needs! 

Let’s look at some outputs from a Hopper model based on Santa’s supply chain in France: 

The map below shows that Santa can use his four sleighs to cover most cities within seven hours (green routes). He only requires service from 21 elves (red lines). 

Now, Santa has been in this business for a while, and he knows how hungry he tends to get during cold winter nights. He likes to stop for a cookie or two and let his hard-working reindeer have a cup of milk too. He thinks a five-minute break per stop should be enough but how many more elves would it need to pick up the slack? 

Hopper is telling us that Santa will now need 61 elves in addition to the four sleighs. It is interesting to note on the map below that sleighs are assigned to dense urban areas like Paris and Marseille and limited to the Northeast otherwise. Elves that can teleport over long distances are sent to the far-reaching corners of the country.

How Santa’s Transportation Optimization Model Is Built

Baseline scenario
200 customers, with one shipment each coming from a single distribution center.  

Two transportation assets: 

• Sleighs with unlimited capacity, speed of 300kph, a small per distance cost and a seven-hour max time per route. 
• Elves with a capacity of one, and a high fixed cost per route.

Hungry Santa’s scenario
Similar set up but we add a fixed delivery time per stop of five minutes.

Test Cosmic Frog Hopper for Yourself

Cosmic Frog Hopper automatically runs after a network optimization or simulation to accurately calculate last mile route costs in a to-be network. With Hopper analysts can evaluate hundreds of scenarios via powerful hyperscaling technology to design the optimal network and transportation strategy. 

Hopper is available to test in your Cosmic Frog free trial account.