A Real Case of Routing Design for Less-Than-Truckload Motor Carriers Using Genetic Algorithm

How to minimize costs while maintaining a certain level of service is the main concern for most less-than-truckload motor carriers. Hence it is needed to consolidate flows of small shipments and to determine all routes for a fleet of vehicles. In this paper, we proposed a model to describe the routing problem of a real LTL carrier to minimize the long-haul cost with constraints of service time, capacities of different vehicles and management rules. And this paper solved this problem with genetic algorithm and gave the final results using real data of a company in Shandong province, China.