摘要
Some manufacturers replace traditional warehouses with shipping areas at the scattered plants for holding the finished products in order to reduce land usage and inventory cost.The limited storage capacity of such shipping area leads to challenges of scheduling vehicles for pickup since the overflow of storage space is prohibited.A heuristic rule is developed for splitting the continuous arrival of inventory at a plant into a sequence of discrete tasks for pickup.In this way,the original problem can be converted into a multiple trip vehicle routing problem with time window(MTVRPTW).Subsequently,a modified tabu search(TS)algorithm is applied for deriving the schedule.Finally,an industry case of an electric apparatus manufacturer is studied to demonstrate and validate the developed optimization approach,and the results imply good performance of the developed tool.
Some manufacturers replace traditional warehouses with shipping areas at the scattered plants for holding the finished products in order to reduce land usage and inventory cost.The limited storage capacity of such shipping area leads to challenges of scheduling vehicles for pickup since the overflow of storage space is prohibited.A heuristic rule is developed for splitting the continuous arrival of inventory at a plant into a sequence of discrete tasks for pickup.In this way,the original problem can be converted into a multiple trip vehicle routing problem with time window（MTVRPTW）.Subsequently,a modified tabu search（TS）algorithm is applied for deriving the schedule.Finally,an industry case of an electric apparatus manufacturer is studied to demonstrate and validate the developed optimization approach,and the results imply good performance of the developed tool.
基金
National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.71271137)
Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai,China(No.12ZR1415100)
