Distribution planning of bulk lubricants at BP Turkey

Abstract

We address the distribution planning problem of bulk lubricants at BP Turkey. The problem is a multi-product, multi-period, heterogeneous fleet distribution problem which involves the scheduling of customer orders and routing of tank trucks such that total distribution costs are minimized. We model this problem as a 0-1 mixed integer linear program. Since the model is intractable for real-life industrial environment we propose two heuristic approaches and discuss their performances. The first approach is a linear programming relaxation-based algorithm while the second is a threshold accepting heuristic. We propose two variants of the latter heuristic: the first uses the distance priority whereas the second has a due date priority. The numerical results show that both threshold accepting heuristics are able to provide good results fast.