Modelling the Returnable Transport Items (RTI) Short-Term Planning Problem

Returnable transport items (RTI) are used for the handling and transportation of products in the supply chain. Examples of RTIs include plastic polyboxes, stillages or pallets. We consider a network where RTIs are used by multiple suppliers to deliver parts packed in RTIs to multiple customers. We address the short-term planning of empty-RTI flows (i.e., reverse flows) which consists of optimizing the transportation routes used to return empty RTIs from customers to suppliers. A transportation route consists of one or several trucks traveling from a customer to a supplier at a given frequency. The RTI short-term planning problem is critical because it impacts the continuity of loaded-RTI flows and affects the transportation and shortage costs of empty RTIs incurred at the very-short-term. We study a heterogeneous fleet of automotive parts RTIs, under two configurations: pool RTIs, which are standard RTIs shared between suppliers, and dedicated RTIs that are specific to each supplier. To solve the short-term planning problem, we develop a two-step approach using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and a greedy heuristic. For pool RTIs, our models enable a reduction of 30% in the number of trucks used and 20% in the distance traveled. Furthermore, if dedicated and pool RTIs are jointly planned, this would enable a 9% gain in terms of transportation costs.

Automated summary

This study focuses on the short-term planning problem of returnable transport items (RTI) and proposes a two-step approach to solve it. The approach is applied to different configurations of automotive parts RTI. The results show that the use of this method can significantly reduce the number of trucks and travel distance, leading to a decrease in transportation costs.