AdONE Seminar: Alexander Hübner (TUM), Giacomo Dall’Olio (TUM)
Prof. Alexander Hübner (TUM): "Food Supply Chain Management" – This presentation gives an overview of challenges in food supply chain management. Furthermore, it addresses the vehicle routing and delivery frequency problem in grocery distribution. As most grocery retailers nowadays operate their own logistics network with own distribution networks, efficient distribution planning is essential in order to stay competitive in this environment. More specifically, the delivery policies for all stores and the resulting vehicle routes for replenishing store inventory from the distribution centers need to be optimized. Due to recent technological advances, retailers now have the option using multi-compartment vehicles. Grocery products requiring differing temperature zones (e.g. deep-frozen, fresh, ambient) can be transported jointly as the loading area is split into separate compartments. Joining the different product segments on one truck has also impact on the repetitive delivery patterns. Retailers usually apply such repetitive delivery patterns due to advantages when scheduling the workforce for shelf replenishment, defining cyclic transportation routes and managing warehouse capacities. In doing so, all logistics subsystems of a retail chain, i.e., warehousing, transportation and instore logistics, are jointly scheduled. We propose a novel Periodic Multi-Compartment Vehicle Routing Problem to minimize total costs in all associated subsystems of a retail distribution chain under the setting of multi-compartment vehicles.
Giacomo Dall’Olio (TUM, AdONE)
Scheduling and Routing Worker Teams for Ground Handling at Airports with Column Generation
Poor planning of ground handling operations is one of the main causes of flight delays. Ground handling consists of those services required by the aircraft before and after a flight. In order to avoid delays, it is desirable to perform the ground tasks as soon as possible to make sure the due dates are met and to prevent the cascade effect. Each type of task requires workers with specific skills in order to be performed. Furthermore, the size of the team of workers performing a task has an impact on its duration. In this paper, we propose a solution approach for the scheduling of the ground handling tasks combined with the routing of the workers on the apron. The solution method is based on column generation, and branch and price. Experimental studies based on data from a major European airport are carried out to evaluate the quality of the algorithm.
