A multi-start local search heuristic for the multi-period auto-carrier loading and transportation problem in Brazil

Antonio Carlos Bonassa, Claudio Barbieri da Cunha and Cassiano Augusto Isler

European Journal of Operational Research, 2023, vol. 307, issue 1, 193-211

Abstract: This paper deals with a variation of the Dynamic Multi-Period Auto-Carrier Transportation Problem (DMPACTP) applied to real-world problems in the automotive industry in Brazil. The problem consists in finding the set of vehicles to be loaded into auto-carriers over a planning horizon of multiple days while minimizing the total transportation cost and fulfilling the loading constraints and meeting the delivery deadlines. Our study considers that the loading sequence policy at each stop is not required, and a minimum cost of auto-carriers is calculated on a per trip basis. We propose a Multi-Start Local Search Heuristic (MSLSH) to solve large-scale instances that arise in practice. Computational experiments compare the solutions obtained by means of our heuristic with the exact solutions for four medium size instances faced by a major Brazilian 3PL as well as with the manual allocation for two larger instances comprising 3,865 and 3,809 vehicles that could not be solved using the exact model. The results show that the proposed heuristic is able to obtain the optimal solutions for all the tested medium-sized instances. For large-sized instances that cannot be solved to optimality, we could obtain significant total transportation cost reductions (up to 15.40%) and lower number of vehicles delivered after the promised due date compared to the 3PL manual allocation. The 3PL was satisfied with the results and intends to deploy it into production environment as the MSLSH is robust, does not require extensive parameter calibration and it is easy to implement.

Keywords: Logistics; New-vehicle transportation problem; Auto-carrier; Local search; Heuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221722006816
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ejores:v:307:y:2023:i:1:p:193-211

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2022.08.036

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().