A Practical Heuristic for Economic Truck Selection: A Case Study of Paper Wholesaler in Bangkok

Abstract

This article outlines a practical heuristic for selecting trucks and allocating customer orders for daily paper distribution in Bangkok. A binary linear program was first developed. The objective function was to minimize the total rental cost subject to daily customer orders and truck capacities. Solving the model could give truck selection and order assignment for each truck simultaneously. Nevertheless, solving the proposed model was not practical because the computation runtime was too long. Thus, a practical heuristic was then proposed and used to obtain a truck selection/order assignment plan. A numerical example modified from a real-world case was used to demonstrate the mechanism of the proposed heuristic. Finally, its performance was evaluated by numerical simulations.

Keywords: Logistics Problem; Binary Linear Programming; Heuristic; Numerical Simulations.