An Integrated Approach to Product Delivery Planning and Scheduling

Abstract

-Product delivery planning and scheduling is a task of high priority in transport logistics. In distribution centres this task is related to deliveries of various types of goods in predefined time windows. In real-life applications the problem has different stochastic performance criteria and conditions. Optimisation of schedules itself is time consuming and requires an expert knowledge. In this paper an integrated approach to product delivery planning and scheduling is proposed. It is based on a cluster analysis of demand data of stores to identify typical dynamic demand patterns and product delivery tactical plans, and simulation optimisation to find optimal parameters of transportation or vehicle schedules. Here, a cluster analysis of the demand data by using the K-means clustering algorithm and silhouette plots mean values is performed, and an NBTree-based classification model is built. In order to find an optimal grouping of stores into regions based on their geographical locations and the total demand uniformly distributed over regions, a multiobjective optimisation problem is formulated and solved with the NSGA II algorithm.