Vehicle scheduling and routing with trailers
AssigneeSap SE
InventorsJens Gottlieb, H. Thomas Engelmann, J. Christoph Eckert, Carsten G. Schumm
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Abstract
Embodiments of the invention include a system for scheduling the shipment of a set of products. The shipment may be loaded into a set of vehicle combinations, which are composed of a combination of vehicles and trailers. The system may include attempts to fill each vehicle and trailer in each vehicle combination. The system may include evaluating a set of constraints on the shipment. The process may include an optimization process to generate the most cost effective use of the available vehicle combinations.
Claims28
A method comprising:
- selecting a first transportation order;
- selecting a vehicle combination to assign the first transportation order;
- assigning the first transportation order to the vehicle combination;
- selecting a first trailer in the vehicle combination;
- and
- assigning the first transportation order to the first trailer.
The method of 4, further comprising:
- optimizing the transportation plan using any one of a local search, a tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, mixed integer linear programming or constraint programming.
A system comprising:
- a demand order generating module, to generate a set of demand orders;
- and
- a transportation determination module to receive the set of demand orders, generate a set of transportation orders and a transportation plan having transportation orders assigned to vehicle combinations and trailers.
The system of 15, wherein the vehicle combination graph plots transitions between feasible vehicle combinations.
The system of 14, further comprising:
- an optimizer to optimize the transportation plan including assignment of transportation orders to trailers.
A machine readable medium having a set of instructions stored therein which when executed cause a machine to perform a set of operations comprising:
- receiving a set of transportation orders;
- iterating through permutations of the set of transportation orders distributed across trailers of a set of vehicle combinations;
- and
- identifying a configuration that meets a set of predetermined constraints related to the trailers and the set of transportation orders.
An apparatus comprising:
- means for receiving a set of transportation orders;
- means for iterating through permutations of the transportation orders distributed across trailers of a set of vehicles;
- and
- means for identifying configurations that meet a set of predetermined criteria related to the trailers and the set of transportation orders.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.