Resources Synchronization in a Full Truck-Load Pickup and Delivery Problem : An Exact Approach

For many industries, logistic activities encompass an important part of the total costs and sometimes, the success of the company strongly depends on the performance of these activities. Counting on a good transportation plan is a key issue to obtain desirable achievements. In general, these activities involve allocation, routing and scheduling integrated decisions, which turn the problem difficult to be solved. In this work, a mathematical programming model for the simultaneous optimization of these three decision levels for a general full truck-load pickup and delivery problem with time windows and resources synchronization is proposed. In order to improve the model performance, constraints management through reformulations, valid inequalities and symmetric-breaking constrains are studied and implemented. Moreover, with the aim of provide good initial feasible solutions, an heuristic initialization methodology is proposed. The capabilities of the proposed approach are assessed through several examples. In this way, the main contribution of this work is providing an efficient approach for solving the hard and complex daily transportation problem of materials within a supply chain