Vehicle routing optimization for inbound transportation plan of factories in the automotive sector. A Renault case study

Abstract : Supplying the 38 factories of Renault with raw materials represents a major economic challenge. The contractualized transportation plan with third-party logistics providers must be defined by respecting operational or network constraints. The first step in defining the inbound transportation plan is to decide for each flow whether it will be direct or indirect, knowing its forecast demands. In the literature, this decision problem is called service network design or network planning in the literature of cross-docking. The following decisions consist in finding the routes when the determined volumes do not complete a full vehicle. These routes are composed of multiple loading points (suppliers) and one or more unloading points (factory docks). This problem is called the vehicle routing problem (VRP), extensively studied in the literature.