Abstract
This paper studies a combination of two well-known problems in distribution logistics, which are the truck loading problem and the vehicle routing problem. In our context, a customer daily demand exceeds the truck capacity. As a result, the demand has to be split into several routes. In addition, it is required to assign customers to depots, which means that each customer is visited just once by any truck in the fleet. Moreover, we take into consideration a customer time windows. The studied problem can be defined as a Multi-depots open split delivery and pickup vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraints and time windows (2L-MD-OSPDTW). A mathemat-ical formulation of the problem is proposed as a mixed-integer linear programming model. Then, a set of four class instances is used in a way that reflects the real-life case study. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm is proposed to solve a large scale dataset. Finally, preliminary results are reported and show that the MILP performs very well for small test instances while the genetic algorithm can be efficiently used to solve the problem for a wide-reaching test instances.
Highlights
LPG logistics transportation, in particular the distribution of the Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) cylinders is considered among the basic building blocks in the Oil and Gas downstream supply chain and known to be a very complex supply chain [11]
In a previous paper we have introduced the split delivery and pickup vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraints
The test instances considered in our paper are derived from a real-life dataset provided by a major petroleum company in Morocco
Summary
LPG logistics transportation, in particular the distribution of the Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) cylinders is considered among the basic building blocks in the Oil and Gas downstream supply chain and known to be a very complex supply chain [11]. A typical LPG downstream supply chain consists of filling plants, distribution locations, fleet of trucks and customer’s depots. Each filling plant has an attached distribution location which is a cylinder’s storage unit supplied from the production unit, serves a set of customers by using a fleet of trucks. The companies do not sell the gas cylinders but just the gas contents inside and the packaging remains their property. This type of packaging management system is called consignment
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