Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

2414. Industrial-scale load carrier to truck assignment with implicit truck loading constraints

Invited abstract in session TC-10: Fulfillment Operations II, stream Supply Chain Management and Production.

Thursday, 11:45-13:15
Room: H16

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Daniel Wetzel
Decision and Operation Technologies, Bielefeld University
2. Jakob Schulte
Decision Analytics Group, Bielefeld University
3. Mohamed Amine Khatouf
Renault
4. Michael Römer
Decision Analytics Group, Bielefeld University
5. Kevin Tierney
Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna

Abstract

In modern supply chains, the efficient transportation of goods is crucial for ensuring timely and effective deliveries. This work introduces a novel approach to optimize load carrier to truck assignments within supply chains. By integrating implicit truck loading constraints into an assignment formulation, we determine the number of trucks needed each day to meet resource demands and ensure on-time delivery. We develop a mixed-integer linear programming formulation that reliably provides lower and upper bounds, along with a heuristic, to minimize total supply chain costs, including item costs incurred from late shipments and truck costs. Through computational experiments in a detailed case study provided by Renault, a major car manufacturer, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving decision-making and optimizing truck usage, considering up to 15,000 trucks and 210,000 items. The proposed approach not only reduces costs and supports more sustainable supply chain practices, but also provides decision-makers with reliable minimum and maximum cost estimates for the considered supply chains within minutes. We benchmark our results against a state-of-the-art algorithm from the literature, underscoring the value of integrating truck loading anticipation in assignment models to minimize supply chain costs and accurately determine the number of trucks required for efficient operations.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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