Research On Automobile Parts Milk-run Routing Problem With Split Deliveries

China has now become the largest automobile consumption countryin the world while other countries are suffering their financial crisis. AndChina’s automobile market is still keeping growth constantly. However, asthe rapid rise of automobile enterprises in China, it also leads to thesevere competition in the automobile industry. Besides products, servicesand prices, the enterprises are paying more and more attention to thelogistics cost control, in order to develop a larger profit space.As the source of the automobile logistics, automobile parts inboundlogistics plays the vital role. In order to hold a low costs, the automobilemanufacturing factory would like to cooperate with the third partylogistics company to conduct a milk-run pickup in the parts inboundlogistics. Due to the milk-run pickup’s characteristics of high frequency,low volume and time punctuality, the enterprises can effectively reduceinventory levels, and to achieve the goal of lean production.However, the traditional milk-run pickup has the limit of thesuppliers’ quantity of the supply must be less than the capacity of the transport vehicles, and this limit often leads to low load. In order to solvethis problem, this paper put forward the resolution of the suppliers’demand be split to several different routes. And the research in this paperis based on this idea.In this paper, we will firstly make a deep research of the automobileparts milk-run routing problem with split deliveries. The milk-run modehas been widely used in the automobile parts supply. The key to themilk-run is to seek the optimal paths for the vehicles. In this paper, wedeveloped a milk-run model with time windows, vehicle capacities andsplit deliveries. The objective function is to minimize the total cost of thetransportation and inventory. In order to solve this model, a taboo searchalgorithm was proposed. According to the specificity of the model, thetaboo search algorithm was designed with special treatments on initialsolution and neighborhood search. In the end, we used somecomputational experiments to testify the validity and efficiency of themodel and the algorithm. The results indicated that the transportation costcan be saved and the vehicle loading rate can be improved by this modeland algorithm.Then in this paper we do the research on the application methods ofthe automobile parts milk-run routing problem with split deliveries, andgive the specific operation processes and the analysis of the demands which are necessary for the implementation of the milk-run with splitdeliveries.