Renault’s Truck Loading Contest
Every two years, the ROADEF/EURO challenge, organized by the French Operations Research Society (ROADEF) and the European Operational Research Society (EURO), proposes a topic for the research community to work on. The ROADEF challenges allow the industry to perceive better recent developments in the field of Operations Research and Decision Support and confront young academics with a complex decision-making problem encountered in the industrial environment. This year, the Renault Group was in charge of the subject and proposed a Truck Loading Problem to solve. Victor and Guillaume, Optimization Scientists at LocalSolver, took up the challenge.
The Renault Group’s Truck Loading Problem
RENAULT’s supply chain spans over 40 plants in 17 countries and 1,500 suppliers. Every week, 6,000 trucks deliver parts from suppliers to plants. The filling rate of these trucks is critical since the inbound transportation annual budget is over several hundred million euros. The objective is to pack a set of items from suppliers into stacks and to pack the stacks into trucks that deliver to the plants, to minimize the number of trucks used and the inventory in the plants due to early deliveries. In terms of data volume, a large instance can contain up to 260,000 items and 5,000 planned trucks over a horizon of 7 weeks.
Winners of the first stage
In just a few weeks of work, Victor and Guillaume won the first stage of the ROADEF/EURO Challenge with 19 best-known solutions found on 30 by relying on LocalSolver. We congratulate Victor and Guillaume and wish them good luck for the next stages of the competition. See you in July 2023 for the results!
