Applied real-valued genetic algorithm for an extended model of economic lot, purchase and delivery scheduling problem

Supply chain management intends to integrate supply chains' activities such as material flow, information flow and financial issues. Material flow management is the most significant issue since the inventory level in the whole supply chain could be optimized by an integrated plan. In other words, when one member of the supply chain plans to reduce its inventory level solely, despite reducing inventory in this node the inventory will be stocked in other partners' warehouses. Therefore, in this paper a new mathematical model has been developed to facilitate the process of finding the optimum solution in economic production, purchase and delivery lots and their schedules in a three-echelon supply chain environment; including raw material in suppliers, manufacturer and assembly facility as a customer. The manufacturer with a flow shop system provides its requirements from supplier, assemble multiple products, and delivers products to the customer (automotive OEM alike) on an optimum multiple delivery points. The delivery cycles would be identified through the production common cycle regarding the supply chain flexibility. Finally, a modified real-valued Genetic Algorithm (MRGA), and an Optimal Enumeration Method (OEM) are developed, and some numerical experiments have been done and compared as well.

ALWAES

For an online delivery platform, accurate physical locations of merchants are essential for delivery scheduling. It is challenging to maintain tens of thousands of merchant locations accurately because of potential errors introduced by merchants for profits (e.g., potential fraud). In practice, a platform periodically sends a dedicated crew to survey limited locations due to high workforce costs, leaving many potential location errors. In this paper, we design and implement ALWAES, a system that automatically identifies and corrects location errors based on fundamental tradeoffs of five measurement strategies from manual, physical, and virtual data collection infrastructures for online delivery platforms. ALWAES explores delivery data already collected by platform infrastructures to measure the travel time of couriers between merchants and verify all merchants' locations by cross-validation automatically. We explore tradeoffs between performance and cost of different measurement approaches. By comparing with the manually-collected ground truth, the experimental results show that ALWAES outperforms three other baselines by 32.2%, 41.8%, and 47.2%, respectively. More importantly, ALWAES saves 3,846 hours of the delivery time of 35,005 orders in a month and finds new erroneous locations that initially were not in the ground truth but are verified by our field study later, accounting for 3% of all merchants with erroneous locations.

Comparative Perspectives on Modern Logistics Transportation Based on Green Logistics in Europe and Indonesia: Concept of Sustainable Economy

The concept of logistics is a supply chain system to facilitate the movement of goods and resources (raw materials), delivery scheduling, storage, and marketing to consumer endpoints that support economic growth. The increase in logistics transportation also has a negative impact, especially environmental problems, the effectiveness of logistics transportation, and the quality of materials and goods which will eventually involve economic problems. This article aims to compare the implementation of modern logistics transportation systems in the European Union and Indonesia with the application of green logistics. This study uses a comparative study method with a qualitative descriptive approach to modern logistics transportation that applies the concept of green logistics. The problem of European Union logistics transportation is only in the human resources sector and congestion in a certain period. The solution is to add regulations related to alternative or manipulated road systems to reduce congestion. On the other hand, the problems that exist in Indonesia are related to the low facilities, regulations, and investment for logistics transportation. As a solution, several regulations and programs have been implemented as a green logistics concept such as anti-ODOL regulations, and the sea toll program.

Integrated Optimization of Routing and Energy Management for Electric Vehicles in Delivery Scheduling

At present, electric vehicles (EVs) are attracting increasing attention and have great potential for replacing fossil-fueled vehicles, especially for logistics applications. However, energy management for EVs is essential for them to be advantageous owing to their limitations with regard to battery capacity and recharging times. Therefore, inefficiencies can be expected for EV-based logistical operations without an energy management plan, which is not necessarily considered in traditional routing exercises. In this study, for the logistics application of EVs to manage energy and schedule the vehicle route, a system is proposed. The system comprises two parts: (1) a case-based reasoning subsystem to forecast the energy consumption and travel time for each route section, and (2) a genetic algorithm to optimize vehicle routing with an energy consumption situation as a new constraint. A dynamic adjustment algorithm is also adopted to achieve a rapid response to accidents in which the vehicles might be involved. Finally, a simulation is performed to test the system by adjusting the data from the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Solomon benchmarks are used for the validations. The analysis results show that the proposed vehicle management system is more economical than the traditional method.

Approximate and robust bounded job start scheduling for Royal Mail delivery offices

Motivated by mail delivery scheduling problems arising in Royal Mail, we study a generalization of the fundamental makespan scheduling $$P||C_{\max }$$ P | | C max problem which we call the bounded job start scheduling problem. Given a set of jobs, each specified by an integer processing time $$p_j$$ p j , that have to be executed non-preemptively by a set of m parallel identical machines, the objective is to compute a minimum makespan schedule subject to an upper bound $$g\le m$$ g ≤ m on the number of jobs that may simultaneously begin per unit of time. With perfect input knowledge, we show that Longest Processing Time First (LPT) algorithm is tightly 2-approximate. After proving that the problem is strongly $${\mathcal {N}}{\mathcal {P}}$$ N P -hard even when $$g=1$$ g = 1 , we elaborate on improving the 2-approximation ratio for this case. We distinguish the classes of long and short instances satisfying $$p_j\ge m$$ p j ≥ m and $$p_j<m$$ p j < m , respectively, for each job j. We show that LPT is 5/3-approximate for the former and optimal for the latter. Then, we explore the idea of scheduling long jobs in parallel with short jobs to obtain tightly satisfied packing and bounded job start constraints. For a broad family of instances excluding degenerate instances with many very long jobs, we derive a 1.985-approximation ratio. For general instances, we require machine augmentation to obtain better than 2-approximate schedules. In the presence of uncertain job processing times, we exploit machine augmentation and lexicographic optimization, which is useful for $$P||C_{\max }$$ P | | C max under uncertainty, to propose a two-stage robust optimization approach for bounded job start scheduling under uncertainty aiming in a low number of used machines. Given a collection of schedules of makespan $$\le D$$ ≤ D , this approach allows distinguishing which are the more robust. We substantiate both the heuristics and our recovery approach numerically using Royal Mail data. We show that for the Royal Mail application, machine augmentation, i.e., short-term van rental, is especially relevant.

Efficient Schedule of Energy-Constrained UAV Using Crowdsourced Buses in Last-Mile Parcel Delivery

Stimulated by the dramatical service demand in the logistics industry, logistics trucks employed in last-mile parcel delivery bring critical public concerns, such as heavy cost burden, traffic congestion and air pollution. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a promising alternative tool in last-mile delivery, which is however limited by insufficient flight range and load capacity. This paper presents an innovative energy-limited logistics UAV schedule approach using crowdsourced buses. Specifically, when one UAV delivers a parcel, it first lands on a crowdsourced social bus to parcel destination, gets recharged by the wireless recharger deployed on the bus, and then flies from the bus to the parcel destination. This novel approach not only increases the delivery range and load capacity of battery-limited UAVs, but is also much more cost-effective and environment-friendly than traditional methods. New challenges therefore emerge as the buses with spatiotemporal mobility become the bottleneck during delivery. By landing on buses, an Energy-Neutral Flight Principle and a delivery scheduling algorithm are proposed for the UAVs. Using the Energy-Neutral Flight Principle, each UAV can plan a flying path without depleting energy given buses with uncertain velocities. Besides, the delivery scheduling algorithm optimizes the delivery time and number of delivered parcels given warehouse location, logistics UAVs, parcel locations and buses. Comprehensive evaluations using a large-scale bus dataset demonstrate the superiority of the innovative logistics UAV schedule approach.

Bulk SMS Communication Portal

Sending SMS to large amount of people in an organization is a tedious process and it requires more human effort tocomplete the task. The best solution in this aspect could be developing a portal which facilitate sending bulk SMS to multiple users. But the problem here is the portal should be more user-friendly. Otherwise, the portal also requires more human effort in entering data like mobile number for large amount of people. This project provide a solution for organization to send bulk SMS and with various features like log generation, notification of failure ofSMS and/or delivery, scheduling of SMS,alert/notification system,read and unread status, provision of importing contact details from excel worksheets, customizing with name of the receiver and so on. The application can be easily used and maintained by an administrator in the organization in a more effective manner.