Transportation optimization for the collection of end-of-life vehicles

Abstract

Firms operating in the purchasing of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) have significant challenges related to the fact that most of the purchased ELVs must be collected efficiently in order to minimize their transportation costs. In this project, we study a reverse logistics problem of a Canadian firm that collects ELVs from a group of dealers and accumulates them at its warehouse for part resale or recycling. This problem can be modeled as a vehicle routing problem (VRP) with different side-constraints. Although prior research has made several contributions to model and solve different variants of the VRP, the specific issue in this project considers solving a VRP with a new combination of constraints, such as customer assignment to the private fleet or an external carrier, time-windows, multi-trip, and loading sequences. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model as well as a heuristic algorithm capable of finding the routes’ planning that minimizes the total transportation costs. The performance of the proposed methods is assessed by generated instances using the data obtained from the company.

Date	26 Jul 2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Amin Chaabane (Supervisor) & Mustapha Ouhimmou (Co-supervisor)