A Decomposition Strategy for Optimal Design of a Soda Company Distribution System

Abstract EN

This work presents a distribution problem of products of a soda bottling company.

Commodities areproduced at several plants with limited capacity and the demand of distribution centers is satisfied by shippingvia cross-docking warehouses.

The decomposition strategy is proposed to determine which warehouse needsto be opened to consolidate the demand and by which warehouse each distribution center is served exclusively.

The objective is minimizing fixed costs and total transportation costs.

The model presented is a mixed-integerprogramming model with binary variables for which we propose a decomposition strategy based on Bendersalgorithm.

Numerical results show that the proposed strategy can provide the optimal solution of several instances.

A large-scale case study based on a realistic company situation is analyzed.

Solutions obtained by the proposedmethod are compared with the solution of full scale problem in order to determine the quality bound andcomputational time.