Routing of vehicles for material delivery to assembly lines

Abstract

This work deals with the routing of vehicles for material delivery to assembly lines. In this problem, parts are stored in central depot to be distributed to points of use located along the production line. Production rate in the assembly line is considered constant, which means that parts are delivered to points of use periodically. The boxes or containers with parts are moved by a fleet of tow cars using wheeled towed carts. The objective of this problem is to determine a set of routes that use the tow cars, aiming to maximize their utilization while ensuring that the demand for parts along the assembly line is fulfilled. This problem is common to several companies and has direct impacts on material handling costs. This subject is not commonly found in the literature, and several companies use operator experience to determine the routes of tow cars. In this work, we propose a heuristic based on insertion and improvement procedures to find a good solution for the problem. The heuristic was applied to a real problem and yielded to the reduction of the number of routes when compared to manual solution.

Keywords:
Vehicle routing; Logistics; Line feeding; Heuristic