This article presents a metaheuristic algorithm to solve the pallet-building problem and the loading of these in trucks. This approach is used to solve a real application of a Colombian logistics company. Several practical requirements of goods loading and unloading operations were modeled, such as the boxes’ orientation, weight support limits associated with boxes, pallets and vehicles, and static stability constraints. The optimization algorithm consists of a two-phase approach, the first is responsible for the construction of pallets, and the second considers the optimal location of the pallets into the selected vehicles. Both phases present a search strategy type of GRASP. The proposed methodology was validated through the comparison of the performance of the solutions obtained for deliveries of the logistics company with the solutions obtained using a highly accepted commercial packing tool that uses two different algorithms. The proposed methodology was compared in similar conditions with the previous works that considered the same constraints of the entire problem or at least one of the phases separately. We used the sets of instances published in the literature for each of the previous works. The results allow concluding that the proposed algorithm has a better performance than the most known commercial tool for real cases. The proposed algorithm managed to match most of the test instances and outperformed some previous works that only involve decisions of one of the two problems. As future work, it is proposed to adapt this work to the legal restrictions of the European community.

In multisite production environments, the appropriate management of production resources is an activity of fundamental relevance to optimally respond to market demands. In particular, each production facility can operate with different policies according to its objectives, prioritizing the quality and standardization of the product, customer service, or the overall efficiency of the system; goals which must be taken into account when planning the production of the entire complex. At the operational level, in order to achieve an efficient operation of the production system, the integrated problem of batching and scheduling must be solved over all facilities, instead of doing it for each plant separately, as has been usual so far. Then, this paper proposes a mixed-integer linear programming model for the multisite batching and scheduling problems, where different operational policies are considered for multiple batch plants. Through two examples, the impact of policies on the decision-making process is shown.

Production planners today must simultaneously face with the time and quality demands of various goods externally and meet limited capacity internally. This study presents a two-stage delayed- differentiation multiproduct model that considers the outsourcing options for common parts, overtime strategy for end products, and quality reassurance to assist in making fabrication runtime decisions that are cost-effective. Stage one produces all necessary common intermediate components for end products. To reduce stage one’s utilization/uptime, this study adopts a partial outsourcing option. Stage two uses an overtime strategy to fabricate end products that further shorten the uptime. The production processes in both phases are assumed to be imperfect. This study employs the reworking/scrapping of random faulty items to reassure product quality. The researchers build a model to depict the proposed problem’s characteristics and used the mathematical modeling, analysis, and optimization approach to determine the best rotation cycle length that minimizes the system’s expenses. Further, in this study, the researchers provide sensitivity analyses and a numerical illustration, which validate the result’s applicability and exhibit its capability. This result contributes to practical multiproduct-fabrication by (1) deriving the optimal manufacturing policy for a delayed-differentiation multiproduct system with dual uptime reduction policies and quality reassurance; and (2) offering a decisional model that allows production planners to explore the collective/separate effect of a quality-ensured and dual uptime reduction strategy on a problem’s operating policy and crucial system performance indicators, which assists in cost-effective decision-making.

A new case of joint location and scheduling (ScheLoc) problem is considered. It deals with selecting a non-fixed number of locations for identical parallel executors (machines) from a given set of available sites. Simultaneously, a schedule for a set of tasks is sought. For every task, it comprises an executor carrying-out the task and the moment of time when the performance of the task is started. The locations for executors and the schedule are evaluated by two criteria: the sum of task completion times and investment costs incurred when locations for executors are selected and launched. It is justified that the joint optimization problem is strongly NP-hard. In consequence, a heuristic algorithm Alg_BC is proposed, which uses the general scheme of NSGA II provided for the multi-criteria optimization. The performance of Alg_BC is evaluated for small instances by exact solutions determined by the Matlab solver. The sensitivity analysis for bigger instances is also provided, which among others, allows examining the influence of both component criteria on results generated by the evaluated algorithm. A case study dealing with the evacuation of citizen groups from danger zones is provided as an example of the investigated bi-criteria ScheLoc problem. The usefulness of Alg_BC is confirmed as well.

In this work, a mixed-integer linear programming model is formulated to allocate the appropriate orders to the right suppliers for recyclable raw materials. We modify the previous model for the supplier selection and order allocation problem for stochastic demand to cope with the supply risks of recyclable raw materials such as insufficient supply quantity, defective rate, and late delivery. The optimal solution of the mathematical model is the benchmark for small-sized problems. Then, a hybrid meta-heuristic of Particles Swarm Optimization and Grey Wolf Optimization (PSO-GWO) is proposed to search for the best solution for large-sized problems. A real-life case study of a steel manufacturer with two factories in Vietnam is presented to validate the proposed approach. Some experiments have been tested to confirm the performance of the hybrid PSO-GWO approach.

The vehicle routing problem combined with loading of goods, considering the reduction of fuel consumption, aims at finding the set of routes that will serve the demands of the customers, arguing that the fuel consumption is directly related to the weight of the load in the paths that compose the routes. This study integrates the Fuel Consumption Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Two-Dimensional Loading Constraints (2L-FHFVRP). To reduce fuel consumption taking the associated environmental impact into account is a classical VRP variant that has gained increasing attention in the last decade. The objective of this problem is to design the delivery routes to satisfy the customers’ demands with the lowest possible fuel consumption, which depends on the distances of the paths, the assigned vehicles, the loading/unloading pattern and the load weight. In the vehicle routing problem literature, the approximate algorithms have had great success, especially the evolutionary ones, which appear in previous works with quite a sophisticated structure, obtaining excellent results, but that are difficult to implement and adapt to other variants such as the one proposed here. In this study, we present a specialized genetic algorithm to solve the design of routes, keeping its main characteristic: the easy implementation. By contrast, the loading of goods restriction is validated by means of a GRASP algorithm, which has been widely employed for solving packing problems. With a view of confirming the performance of the proposed methodology, we provide a computational study that uses all the available benchmark instances, allowing to illustrate the savings achieved in fuel consumption. In addition, the methodology suggested can be adapted to the version of solely minimizing the total distance traveled for serving the customers (without the fuel consumption) and it is compared to the best works presented in the literature. The computational results show that the methodology manages to be adequately adapted to this version and it is capable of finding improved solutions for some benchmark instances. As for future work, we propose to adjust the methodology to consider the three-dimensional loading problem so that it adapts to more real-life conditions of the industry.

Bin packing problem (BPP) is a combinatorial optimization problem with a wide range of applications in fields such as financial budgeting, load balancing, project management, supply chain management. Harmony search algorithm (HSA) is widely used for various real-world and engineering problems due to its simplicity and efficient problem solving capability. Literature shows that basic HSA needs improvement in search capability as the performance of the algorithm degrades with increase in the problem complexity. This paper presents HSA with improved exploration and exploitation capability coupled with local iterative search based on random swap operator for solving BPP. The study uses the despotism based approach presented by Yadav et al. (2012) [Yadav P., Kumar R., Panda S.K., Chang, C. S. (2012). An intelligent tuned harmony search algorithm for optimisation. Information Sciences, 196, 47-72.] to divide Harmony memory (HM) into two categories which helps to maintain balance between exploration and exploitation. Secondly, local iterative search explores multiple neighborhoods by exponentially swapping components of solution vectors. A problem specific HM representation, HM re-initialization strategy and two adaptive PAR strategies are tested. The performance of proposed HSA is evaluated on 180 benchmark instances which consists of 100, 200 and 500 objects. Evaluation metrics such as best, mean, success rate, acceleration rate and improvement measures are used to compare HSA variations. The performance of the HSA with iterative local search outperforms other two variations of HSA.

A practical distribution system that arises in the context of delivering liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) through cylinders is considered in this study. To meet all the challenging constraints, the model is explicitly considered as a simultaneous pickup and delivery single commodity truncated vehicle routing problem with the homogeneous fleet of vehicles. The aim of this problem is to find the optimal routes for the set of vehicles locating at the distributing agency (DA), which offers simultaneous pickup and delivery operations over single commodity (i.e. LPG cylinders) to a fixed subset (need not serve all delivery centers) of delivery centers at rural level. The model is designed using zero-one integer linear programming. For proper treatment of the present model, an exact Lexi-search algorithm (LSA) has been developed. A comparative study is performed between the LSA and existing results for the relaxed version of the present model. Further, the efficiency of the LSA is tested through numerical experiments over small and medium CVRP benchmark test instances. The extensive computational results have shown that the LSA is productive and revealed that the real solutions have more consistent than the integral solutions in the presence of truncation constraint.

In this paper, a new period-based approach is proposed for modeling a capacitated inventory system, operating under an (S,T) policy with backlog. The system experiences stochastic discrete demand and lead time. By using the proposed method, a mathematical model is developed. The model can accurately estimate the inventory system measures of performance: the expected inventory on-hands and over-storage amount. Through a simulation experiment, the new model is compared with two other models, which are developed by using a widely used mean-based approach. The comparison is conducted based on a case study data set. The results demonstrate that the period-based model is superior to the mean-based models with respect to capturing the behaviors of the inventory system. Therefore, better inventory policy parameters can be obtained by employing the new model.

This paper presents a mathematical model for a single depot, time-dependent vehicle routing problem with backhaul considering the first in first out (FIFO) assumption. As the nature of the problem is NP-hard, variable neighborhood search (VNS) meta-heuristic and mat-heuristic algorithms have been designed. For test problems with large scales, obtained results highlight the superior performance of the mat-heuristic algorithm compared with that of the other algorithm. Finally a case study at the post office of Khomeini-Shahr town, Iran, was considered. Study results show a reduction of roughly 19% (almost 45 min) in the travel time of the vehicle.