HMS 2015 Proceeding

Supporting real-time decision-making in logistics and transportation by combining simulation with heuristics

Authors:   Angel A. Juan, Javier Faulin, Laura Calvet

Abstract

Supporting decision making in logistics and transportation is one of the most fruitful application areas of simulation and optimization techniques. In a global world, many enterprises need to perform complex procurement and delivery activities. Usually, these problems have an intricate nature, being NP-hard in most cases, which means that heuristic-based optimization approaches are necessary to deal with real- life and large-scale instances whenever a high-quality solution is needed in a short amount of time. Examples of these problems include many variants of the well- known vehicle routing problem, the facility location problem, and the arc routing problem. We will discuss here the role played by Monte Carlo simulation in a suitable mixture with skewed probability distributions to enrich the performance developed by heuristic-based constructive methods. Some examples will highlight the efficiency of this simple yet powerful approach.

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