The coordination of just-in-time production and transportation in a network of partially independent facilities to guarantee timely delivery to distributed customers is one of the most challenging aspect of supply chain management. From the theoretical perspective, the timely production/distribution can be viewed as a hybrid combination of planning, scheduling and routing problem, each notoriou...

Multi-echelon distribution systems are quite common in supply-chain and logistic management. They are used by public administrations in their transportation and traffic planning strategies as well as by companies to model their distribution systems. In the literature, most studies address issues related to the movement of flows throughout the system from the origins to their final destinations....

Hazardous Materials transportation risk mitigation may be achieved by reducing the accident probability and alleviating the associated potential consequences. The consideration of risk as a criterion for selecting Hazardous Materials distribution routes contributes substantially to the reduction of accident probability and the severity of the accident consequences. Furthermore the optimum deplo...

In this paper, we tackle a new variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) which combines two known variants namely the Profitable VRP and the VRP with Mult iple Trips. The resulting problem may be called the Profitable Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Trips. The main purpose is to cover and solve a more complex realistic situation of the distribution transportation. The profitability con...

In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm is proposed to solve a Capacitated Location-Routing Problem. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the distribution in a network composed of depots and customers, both depots and vehicles have limited capacities, each depot has a homogenous vehicle fleet and customers’ demands are known and must be satisfied. Solving this problem involves makin...

This work investigates an intermodal transportation system for delivering goods from a Regional Distribution Centre to supermarkets on the Isle of Wight (IOW) via the port of Southampton or Portsmouth in the UK. We consider this integrated logistics chain as a 3-echelon transportation system. In such a system, there are two types of transport methods used to deliver goods across the Solent Chan...

Routing is gaining prime importance in our increasingly mobile and highly Information Technology enabled world. The shortest path problem is widely applied in transportation, communication and computer networks. It addresses the challenges of determining a path with minimum distance, time or cost from a source to the destination. This paper introduces a novel Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach to ...