Metaheuristic Approaches for Solving Truck and Trailer Routing Problems with Stochastic Demands: A Case Study in Dairy Industry

Seyedmehdi Mirmohammadsadeghi and Shamsuddin Ahmed

Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2015, vol. 2015, 1-14

Abstract:

Manufacturers and service providers often encounter stochastic demand scenarios. Researchers have, thus far, considered the deterministic truck and trailer routing problem (TTRP) that cannot address ubiquitous demand uncertainties and/or other complexities. The purpose of this study is to model the TTRP with stochastic demand (TTRPSD) constraints to bring the TTRP model closer to a reality. The model is solved in a reasonable timeframe using data from a large dairy service by administering the multipoint simulated annealing (M-SA), memetic algorithm (MA), and tabu search (TS). A sizeable number of customers whose demands follow the Poisson probability distribution are considered to model and solve the problem. To make the solutions relevant, first, 21 special TTRPSD benchmark instances are modified for this case and then these benchmarks are used in order to increase the validity and efficiency of the aforementioned algorithms and to show the consistency of the results. Also, the solutions have been tested using sensitivity analysis to understand the effects of the parameters and to make a comparison between the best results obtained by three algorithms and sensitivity analysis. Since the differences between the results are insignificant, the algorithms are found to be appropriate and relevant for solving real-world TTRPSD problem.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/MPE/2015/494019.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/MPE/2015/494019.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnlmpe:494019

DOI: 10.1155/2015/494019

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Mathematical Problems in Engineering from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().