Authors:
Bárbara da Costa Rodrigues
and
André Gustavo dos Santos
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Trips Combination, MILP, Heuristic, Combinatorial Optimization.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Operational Research
;
Problem Solving
;
Scheduling and Planning
Abstract:
Brazilian import and export activities on ports are subject to considerable slow queues and congestion, revealing a lack of medium and/or short-term logistic planning. One of the causes is the number of trucks traveling with empty containers, performing one-way trips, from inland cities to the port or from the port to the cities. This issue may be reduced by combining trips, i.e., after bringing goods to the port (export trip), a truck should, when possible, carry goods from the port to the origin or a nearby city (import trip). In this paper we investigate a combinatorial optimization problem where a set of import/export/inland trips should be combined in order to reduce total traveling time, which in turn reduces the number of empty trucks traveling to/from the port. Individual trips and combined trips must obey national law regulation of resting time, as typical road trips in Brazil covers hundreds, even thousands of kilometers. We also consider opening operation hours on each loc
ation (time windows), which may force a driver to wait upon arriving. We test exact and heuristic approaches, and present the total travel time and number of trucks needed for each solution, considering instances based on real freight data.
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