Finding an initial plan of transport resources FTL allocation in a special VRP problem using linear programming methods

摘要

The special VRP problem of transport resources allocation for freight transportation companies that deliver cargo via FTL business model was considered. It was admitted that each real freight transportation company operates in a real time and needs to react on incoming events adaptively reallocate available resources. For this purposes multi agent systems are well proved and used in many modern freight companies. But it was admitted that there is a possibility to improve a quality optimization level by using the stable time period during night hours when no new events come into the system and there is a time for using classic optimization approach in special sub problem of finding the initial allocation plan. By using expert human real logistic scheduling knowledge for a long time period the essential set of limitations to this initial allocation plan problem was defined. The problem was formalized similar to the classical assignment problem of linear programming. Acyclic and cyclic cases of the problem were considered. It was shown that the acyclic case of the problem could be reduced to the assignment problem easily but for the cyclic case it requires to exclude important resource to order matching condition. Finding the exact solution of the initial plan problem was proposed by using the Hungarian method, which is well proved exact method. It was also shown that this method couldn't be applied in case of real time scheduling, because even in static cyclic case it is impossible to support resource to order matching condition for next future orders, but it can be applied as an addition to the multi agent approach.