标题：A HEURISTIC APPROACH TO THE DAILY DELIVERY SCHEDULING PROBLEM. CASE STUDY: ALCOHOL PRODUCTS DELIVERY SCHEDULING WITHIN INTRA-COMMUNITY TRADE LEGISLATION
摘要：Background: Delivery scheduling plays a significant role in business activities of enterprises which operate on EU market, especially the ones which deal with production and trade of alcohol products. The character of such activities requires to take into consideration various regulations which determine many guidelines and constraints in storing and transporting of such products between EU countries. On the other hand, these issues are not well recognized in the literature. Methods: Authors proposed a heuristic algorithm for solving the problem of scheduling this type of deliveries. Basing on the constraints and input data, which includes demand for deliveries in wider planning horizon, the algorithm creates a daily delivery schedule from one or many suppliers to one consignee. The algorithm takes into consideration the consignee's, suppliers' and carrier's interests. This is done by including their constraints as well as by including three criteria in the scheduling process, i.e. minimization of the stock in transit and minimization of the dispersion of loadings and unloadings in consignee's and each supplier's warehouses. Results: The proposed algorithm has been implemented in spreadsheet with solver extension. It was applied for solving the real delivery scheduling problem in one of alcohol products importing companies, in which manually filling of DRP matrixes method was previously used. The results show that algorithm works correctly and efficiently in comparison to previously used method. Conclusions: The results show, that there is a need for further research on the field of determination suppliers order in the scheduling process. The possibility of implementation of multiple criteria analysis or optimization methods for solving such problems may be also a good direction of further research.
