Research On Automotive Inbound Logistics And Time Window Collaborative Model

Automobile industry plays an important role in Chinese manufacturing.Twenty years' development makes automobile industry turns from competition of quality and efficiency of manufacture to competition of service efficiency.The improvement of inbound logistics system's efficiency plays key roles in service efficiency such as reducing manufacture lead time.Inbound logistics is important to automobile industry,which requires cooperation of manufacturer,supplier and 3PL.Low efficiency in any step have a bad impact on total efficiency of system.So,collaboration and improvement is meaningful to reduce cost and increase competitiveness.This paper studies automotive inbound collaborative logistics,starting from time window.In inbound logistics,manufacturer requires 3PL makes sure that auto parts are transported according to time window.Inappropriate time window leads to practical operation problem,such as the low efficiency of truck loading,high no-load rate and long queuing time of trucks waiting discharge in warehouse.This paper gives a method to set order and waybill time window instead of regarding time window as a known parameter which can not be changed.This paper analyzes inbound logistics and its subsystem: Production Planning,Transportation Management and Warehouse Management System.Based on information interaction and time window collaboration,collaborative system is built,whose complexity is analyzed as well.A mixed integer mathematical model is built to set time window according to factors such as required quantity and time of auto parts,resources of 3PL and rules of operation.This model can reduce transportation cost of 3PL,increase load factor and reduce queuing time of trucks.Heuristics and branch and bound algorithm are designed to reduce computing time so that it can be used in practice.Experiment and case analysis are done to prove the performance of algorithm.It proved that algorithm in this paper can reduce computing time.It is also proved that appropriate time window can collaborate operation of subsystems in inbound logistics and solve problems as mentioned above.