To read this content please select one of the options below:

A genetic approach for freight transportation planning

A.C. Caputo (Faculty of Engineering, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy)
L. Fratocchi (Faculty of Engineering, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy)
P.M. Pelagagge (Faculty of Engineering, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy)

Industrial Management & Data Systems

ISSN: 0263-5577

Article publication date: 1 June 2006

4205

Abstract

Purpose

This purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for optimally planning long‐haul road transport activities through proper aggregation of customer orders in separate full‐truckload or less‐than‐truckload shipments in order to minimize total transportation costs.

Design/methodology/approach

The model is applied to a specific Italian multi‐plant firm operating in the plastic film for packaging sector. The method, given the order quantities to be shipped and the location of customers, aggregates shipments in subgroups of compatible orders resorting to a heuristic procedure and successively consolidates them in optimized full truck load and less than truck load shipments resorting to a Genetic Algorithm in order to minimize total shipping costs respecting delivery due dates and proper geographical and truck capacity constraints.

Findings

The paper demonstrates that evolutionary computation techniques may be effective in tactical planning of transportation activities. The model shows that substantial savings on overall transportation cost may be achieved adopting the proposed methodology in a real life scenario.

Research limitations/implications

The main limitation of this optimisation methodology is that an heuristic procedure is utilized instead of an enumerative approach in order to at first aggregate shipments in compatible sets before the optimisation algorithm carries out the assignments of customer orders to separate truckloads. Even if this implies that the solution could be sub‐optimal, it has demonstrated a very satisfactory performance and enables the problem to become manageable in real life settings.

Practical implications

The proposed methodology enables to rapidly choose if a customer order should be shipped via a FTL or a LTL transport and performs the aggregation of different orders in separate shipments in order to minimize total transportation costs. As a consequence, the task of logistics managers is greatly simplified and consistently better performances respect manual planning can be obtained.

Originality/value

The described methodology is original in both the kind of approach adopted to solve the problem of optimising orders shipping in long‐haul direct shipping distribution logistics, and in the solution technique adopted which integrates heuristic algorithm and an original formulation of a GA optimisation problem. Moreover, the methodology solves both the truckload assignment problem and the choice of LTL vs FTL shipment thus representing an useful tool for logistics managers.

Keywords

Citation

Caputo, A.C., Fratocchi, L. and Pelagagge, P.M. (2006), "A genetic approach for freight transportation planning", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 106 No. 5, pp. 719-738. https://doi.org/10.1108/02635570610666467

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Related articles