A Metaheuristic Approach for In-Plant Milk-Run System with Autonomous Vehicles

Aydin Sipahioglu (), Ilgin Acar and Islam Altin
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Aydin Sipahioglu: Eskisehir Osmangazi University
Ilgin Acar: Western Michigan University
Islam Altin: Eskisehir Osmangazi University

Networks and Spatial Economics, 2024, vol. 24, issue 4, No 10, 1041 pages

Abstract: Abstract Milk-run is a cyclic material delivery system, that aims to increase the efficiency of transportation and supply chain considering the lean logistics aspect. There are two types of milk-run systems in the literature: supplier and in-plant milk-run. The in-plant milk-run system, which has attracted increasing attention with the Industry 4.0 concept, is applied to manage the delivery process of materials from the warehouse to the assembly stations in plants. This system can be implemented using Autonomous Vehicles (AV), which provide automated material handling. However, a challenging problem appears in determining milk-run routes and periods simultaneously for each AV. Furthermore, this problem becomes more difficult in the presence of assembly stations with buffer stock constraints requiring multi-commodity pickup and delivery demands. In this study, the Simulated Annealing algorithm was used due to the Np-Hard nature of the problem. Hence, we generated test instances to show the performance of the proposed algorithm. It is seen that the proposed algorithm is efficient in terms of computational times as well as determining both milk-run routes and periods.

Keywords: Autonomous Vehicles; In-plant milk-run System; Multi-commodity; Pickup and Delivery Demands; Simulated Annealing Algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s11067-024-09650-2

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