Dispatching ready mixed concrete trucks under demand postponement and weight limit regulation

This study formulates the dispatching operations of ready mixed concrete (RMC) trucks as a job shop problem with recirculation, which includes time windows and demand postponement, as well as the external cost of transport, in a multi-objective programming model. This investigation divides factors that affect truck dispatching of RMC plants into intrinsic and imposed constraints, where intrinsic constraints refer to limits that must be satisfied during the concrete distribution process; imposed constraints are those that should be fulfilled to the greatest extent possible during dispatching. The results will help concrete plant dispatchers of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) determine a cost effective and reliable day-to-day distribution scheme and achieve better customer service. This work contributes to both modeling and dispatching operations of RMC trucks as a job shop problem by applying optimization tools that enable RMC SMEs to detect and subsequently take advantage of opportunities that may exist for improving daily operation efficiency.