Modeling capacitated vehicle routing problem to optimize logistics of the engine assembly lines

In the business world a high percentage of prime cost are related to their transportation. Therefore, any action to improve transport ways and eliminate unnecessary trips or create alternative shorter routes leads to significant savings in total costs. One of the well-known optimization issues in this regard is capacitated vehicle routing problem. This problem is among the NP–Hard problems, and many different meta–heuristic algorithms have been used to solve this problem, especially in large dimensions. In this paper, first, we propose a new meta–heuristic for solving capacitated vehicle routing problem. Our research is motivated by an industrial application where engine production lines are supplied from various warehouses at the production plant at Irankhodro Company. The engine parts is stored in storage areas and picked by employees utilizing forklifts. These then transport the picked parts to workstations in the production line. At every time, only a few workstations can be fed. The transport demands of parts from the warehouses to the workstations and between workstations are highly dynamic and transport orders and routes are not yet optimized. Suggested algorithm for capacitated routing problem will be used to determine minimum number of the needed forklifts and a set of optimized orders in order to minimize the total distance traveled by forklifts.

Keywords:

capacitated vehicle routing problem , meta-heuristic algorithm , engine assembly line supply