Replenishment Routing in the Retail Sector

Company’s Challenge

The main objective was to optimize replenishment routes while accounting for all the complex business constraints, left besides by existing solvers. The solution we deployed enabled the optimization of:

• Selection among multiple starting depots and sequencing of several vehicle rotations;
• Controlled temperature & compartmentalized trucks with adjustable size, multi-mode (frozen, fresh, dry);
• Fine modeling of loading/unloading dock congestion, pre-loading times, and driver breaks;
• Accounting for reverse logistics, LIFO and pooling of shop delivery and supplier pickup operations to reduce empty runs.

Solution provided

The optimization tool enabled a 20% reduction in fleet size, while minimizing the need for outsourced transport (reduction of 65%).

It efficiently processed large datasets (+3,200 operations) while maintaining very fast calculation times (< 2 min).