Distribution planning of bulk lubricants at BP Turkey

Distribution planning of bulk lubricants at BP Turkey

0.00 Avg rating0 Votes
Article ID: iaor20123181
Volume: 40
Issue: 6
Start Page Number: 870
End Page Number: 881
Publication Date: Dec 2012
Journal: Omega
Authors: ,
Keywords: distribution, vehicle routing & scheduling, combinatorial optimization, heuristics
Abstract:

We address the distribution planning problem of bulk lubricants at BP Turkey. The problem involves the distribution of different lube products from a single production plant to industrial customers using a heterogeneous fleet. The fleet consists of tank trucks where each tank can only be assigned to a single lube. The objective is to minimize total transportation related costs. The problem basically consists of assigning customer orders to the tanks of the trucks and determining the routes of the tank trucks simultaneously. We model this problem as a 0–1 mixed integer linear program. Since the model is intractable for real‐life industrial environment we propose two heuristic approaches and investigate their performances. The first approach is a linear programming relaxation‐based algorithm while the second is a rolling‐horizon threshold heuristic. We propose two variants of the latter heuristic: the first uses a distance priority whereas the second has a due date priority. Our numerical analysis using company data shows that both variants of the rolling horizon threshold heuristic are able to provide good results fast.

Reviews

Required fields are marked *. Your email address will not be published.