Optimal Shipping Strategies for n Transport Alternatives

摘要

Since Sculli and Wu (1981) the concept of order splitting has been widely studied in the literature. One of the more encompassing approaches is the analysis of order splitting from an inventory-theoretic perspective. This implies that explicit attention is paid to all costs in the supply chain that are affected by the order splitting decision. In this paper the order splitting and inventory-theoretic frameworks are used to determine the optimal mix of transport alternatives when goods are shipped from a supplier to a receiver. The optimal mix of transport alternatives refers to that particular combination of transport alternatives that results in the lowest total logistics costs for the receiver. These costs comprise order costs, transportation costs and inventory costs. It is assumed that only a limited number of transport alternatives are capable of shipping the goods from the supplier to the receiver. Moreover, if a certain transport alternative is selected to ship the goods, then its entire capacity is used. These assumptions imply that the number of possible order quantities is finite and that the problem can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem In a first step to explore the use of metaheuristics for optimization problems like these, a simple Evolutionary Algorithm is developed in this paper. The heuristic is used to solve three problem instances with real-life parameter values.