Design and optimization of milkrun material supply system with simultaneous pickups and deliveries in time windows

Abstract

quotMaterial handling is one of the most crucial issues that should be taken into account for eliminating waste, reducing the cost and just in time-based delivery of the product. Many industries are spending millions of bucks for the transportation of the goods. An effective transportation management system has to be implemented to control the cost of transportation and inventory. The optimized milk-run concept can be utilized to overcome the issue related to the supply chain management system. The milk-run material supply system is the cyclic trips, where either good are collected from several suppliers and delivered to one customer, or goods are collected from one supplier and delivered to several customers. The objective of this research is the minimization of the total material handling and inventory holding cost. It is also concentrated on just in time delivery to enhance the customer satisfaction. These saving of cost could be either used for reduction of the product cost, which will boost up the sales or lift the profit margin of the organization. newlineThe purpose of this research is to develop a mathematical model and a heuristic approach, which is utilized to construct the routes, calculate the associated cost and determine the service period for the design of a milk-run material supply system with simultaneous pick-up and delivery. The material supply by this system occurs on a just-in-time basis from regional offices to several stations of the courier service. Besides, the proposed heuristic approach intends to construct routes based on an initial service period value and attempts to improve the solution by considering different period values. Furthermore, the scheduling of the vehicles is calculated based on demands and routes of the network. The most optimum solution is decided on the basis of the least total transportation cost and minimum time. A genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the vehicle routing with simultaneous pickup and delivery within time frame (VRPTWSPD) problem related to the milk-run conc