The Concrete Delivery Problem

How to deliver, say, 600 vehicle loads of concrete to 200 construction sites with 150 concrete mixer vehicles in order to minimize the costs? When sending where the vehicles can make big differences in costs. Since concrete stays in workable shape only for a certain time inside a vehicle, such concrete delivery problems are subject to constraints, that cannot be found in traditional vehicle routing problems. In this thesis, these logistical problems are analyzed and several models developed. An algorithm based on large neighborhood search is presented, which is capable of solving big real-life instances of such concrete delivery problems heuristically. Although the thesis is mostly concerned with static optimization, issues of and extensions to dynamism and uncertainty are discussed.

Autorentext
The Author: Lasse Asbach was born in Bonn in 1976. He studied computer science at the University of Bonn and received his Diploma in 2002. From 2002 to 2008 he worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Management Information Sciences at the University of Siegen, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2008.

Inhalt
Contents: Concrete Delivery Ready-Mixed Concrete Operations Research Vehicle Routing Vehicle Scheduling Logistics Large Neighborhood Search Algorithm Heuristic Optimization Static Optimization Dynamic Optimization Integer Programming Constraint Programming Just-in-Time Production.