Vehicle compound planning and control system

Abstract

Vehicle compounds act as transshipment points in the supply chain of finished vehicles and face constant performance pressure in their position as a link between the manufacturer and the customer. Improving the process of vehicle movements on compounds holds large potential for raising a compound’s competitiveness. Recent approaches have mainly focused on improving vehicle storage allocation to gain short travel distances for the vehicles on the compound. We go one step further and aim to improve the compound’s productivity by optimizing the drivers’ transfers from one order to the next. We propose a modified operational process flow and design a planning and control system that assigns orders on an individual level. The assigned orders are within walking distance whenever possible. Shuttle tours only come into play where no order starting point is in close vicinity to a previous order. We model the system as an online optimization that aims at two objectives, i.e., time-minimal order execution for drivers and time-minimal shuttle bus routing. The online optimization allows for a rolling planning, which enables the system to account for real-world uncertainties and unforeseen events. We evaluate the system in a discrete-event simulation that maps a real-world use case. The results show that the proposed approach reaches a roughly 25% higher vehicle handling rate than the status quo processes. Due to its generality of the optimization-based problem formulation, the approach is also applicable to other fields, such as vehicle relocation in car-sharing systems or intra-logistic scenarios in production processes.