A fix and optimize heuristic for transportation planning in a single producer multi buyer problem

We address the transportation planning problem for a producer who supplies products to geographically dispersed customers with known demands for a finite planning horizon. The problem originated from a real case which involves a producer of dry pulses, who serves entire Turkey from two production plants. The producer uses services of logistic companies in transporting goods in the form of both renting trucks from a company and using parcel transportation service from a carrier. The decisions that the producer has to make in each period are which customers' demand to load to which trucks, and for which customers' demand to use parcel carrier service. Total cost of transportation is the summation of the fixed renting cost of sending a truck to a zone, a cost depending on the total number of customers visited, and parcel cost. We introduced a mathematical programming model of this problem for the first time in the literature, and suggested a fix and optimize type heuristic solution procedure. We showed the effectiveness of the suggested heuristic on a set of random problem.