Search results for "Operations"
showing 10 items of 1692 documents
Crisis and Opportunities Variables always Addressed Simultaneously in Effective Management
2013
Abstract Understanding the causes, duration and consequences of the crisis and the means to exit it are far from being regarded as sufficiently understood and operationalized. From the general components of the crisis, there was a necessity to be defined and managed separately the subjective component (disorientation, confusion) and the objective component, which are unequivocally different. They have to be operationalized into strategies, programs and tactical procedures to traverse and overcome the crisis with minimal loss. The paper also deals with the opportunities that crisis can create and with the measures necessary to identify and exploit these.
Solving a large multicontainer loading problem in the car manufacturing industry
2017
Abstract Renault, a large car manufacturer with factories all over the world, has a production system in which not every factory produces all the parts required to assemble a vehicle. Every day, large quantities of car parts are sent from one factory to another, defining very large truck/container transportation problems. The main challenge faced by the Renault logistics platforms is to load the items into trucks and containers as efficiently as possible so as to minimize the number of vehicles sent. Therefore, the problem to be solved is a multicontainer loading problem in which, besides the usual geometric constraints preventing items from overlapping and exceeding the dimensions of the c…
Bidirectional labeling for solving vehicle routing and truck driver scheduling problems
2020
Abstract This paper studies the vehicle routing and truck driver scheduling problem where routes and schedules must comply with hours of service regulations for truck drivers. It presents a backward labeling method for generating feasible schedules and shows how the labels generated with the backward method can be combined with labels generated by a forward labeling method. The bidirectional labeling is embedded into a branch-and-price-and-cut approach and evaluated for hours of service regulations in the United States and the European Union. Computational experiments show that the resulting bidirectional branch-and-price-and-cut approach is significantly faster than unidirectional counterp…
Algorithms for Pallet Building and Truck Loading in an Interdepot Transportation Problem
2016
This paper deals with the problem of a logistics company that has to serve its customers by first putting the products on pallets and then loading the pallets into trucks. Besides the standard geometric constraints of products not overlapping each other and not exceeding the dimensions of pallets and trucks, in this real problem, there are many other constraints, related to the total weight of the load, the maximum weight supported by each axle, and the distribution of the load inside the truck. Although the problem can be decomposed into two phases, pallet loading and truck loading, we have taken a combined approach, building and placing pallets at the same time. For each position in the t…
A Branch-and-Cut Algorithm for the Single Truck and Trailer Routing Problem with Satellite Depots
2016
International audience; In the single truck and trailer routing problem with satellite depots (STTRPSD), a truck with a detachable trailer based at a main depot must serve the demand of a set of customers accessible only by truck. Therefore, before serving the customers, it is necessary to detach the trailer in an appropriate parking place (called either a satellite depot or a trailer point) and transfer goods between the truck and the trailer. This problem has applications in milk collection for farms that cannot be reached using large vehicles. In this work we present an integer programming formulation of the STTRPSD. This formulation is tightened with several families of valid inequaliti…
Branch-and-Price-and-Cut for the Truck-and-Trailer Routing Problem with Time Windows
2018
In this paper, we present a new branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm to solve the truck-and-trailer routing problem with time windows (TTRPTW) and two real-world extensions. In all TTRPTW variants, the fleet consists of one or more trucks that may attach a trailer. Some customers are not accessible with a truck-and-trailer combination, but can however be serviced by one if the trailer is previously detached and parked at a suitable location. In the first extension, the planning horizon comprises two days and customers may be visited either on both days or only once, in which case twice the daily supply must be collected. The second extension incorporates load transfer times depending on the …
Mathematical models for multicontainer loading problems
2017
Abstract This paper deals with the problem of a distribution company that has to serve its customers by putting first the products on pallets and then loading the pallets onto trucks. We approach the problem by developing and solving integer linear models. We start with basic models, that include the essential features of the problem, such as respecting the dimensions of the truck, and not exceeding the total weight capacity and the maximum weigh capacity on each axle. Then, we add progressively new conditions to consider the weight and volume of pallet bases and to include other desirable features for the solutions to be useful in practice, such as the position of the center of gravity and…
Branch-and-Price-and-Cut for the Active-Passive Vehicle-Routing Problem
2018
This paper presents a branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm for the exact solution of the active-passive vehicle-routing problem (APVRP). The APVRP covers a range of logistics applications where pickup-and-delivery requests necessitate a joint operation of active vehicles (e.g., trucks) and passive vehicles (e.g., loading devices such as containers or swap bodies). The objective is to minimize a weighted sum of the total distance traveled, the total completion time of the routes, and the number of unserved requests. To this end, the problem supports a flexible coupling and decoupling of active and passive vehicles at customer locations. Accordingly, the operations of the vehicles have to be s…
Simultaneous Vehicle and Crew Routing and Scheduling for Partial- and Full-Load Long-Distance Road Transport
2013
AbstractThis paper studies a simultaneous vehicle and crew routing and scheduling problem arising in long-distance road transport in Europe: Pickup-and-delivery requests have to be fulfilled over a multi-period planning horizon by a heterogeneous fleet of trucks and drivers. Typically, in the vehicle routing literature, a fixed assignment of a driver to a truck is assumed. In our approach, we abandon this assumption and allow truck/driver changes at geographically dispersed relay stations. This offers greater planning flexibility and allows a better utilization of trucks, but also creates intricate interdependencies between trucks and drivers and requires the synchronization of their routes…
Mathematical models for Multi Container Loading Problems with practical constraints
2019
Abstract We address the multi container loading problem of a company that serves its customers’ orders by building pallets with the required products and loading them into trucks. The problem is solved by using integer linear models. To be useful in practice, our models consider three types of constraints: geometric constraints, so that pallets lie completely inside the trucks and do not overlap; weight constraints, defining the maximum weights supported by a truck and by each axle, as well as the position of the centre of gravity of the cargo; and dynamic stability constraints. These last constraints forbid empty spaces between pallets to avoid cargo displacement when the truck is moving, …