Applying Integer Programming in an Everyday Transportation Case: An Optimization Problem
Athena Alimirzaei, Monica E. Brussolo, and Suraj P. Khatri
University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Volume 13: 2019, pp. 5-22; ABSTRACT
Minimizing total transportation cost is not a trivial task; however, most companies use a limited approach, producing suboptimal results. This case focuses on an everyday problem for the transportation industry and its optimization. ABC Construction Company is looking to hire a transportation company to design the best plan in order to ship an assortment of machines required for a construction project at the optimal cost and on time. This case illustrates this problem by balancing supply and demand, minimizing the total transportation cost, and receiving the machines on time. Integer programming and Excel Solver (standard) were the tools used to model this problem. The case may be used in Operations Management undergraduate and graduate courses and Prescriptive Analytics graduate courses as a learning tool for supply chain, transportation, linear integer programming, and optimization.
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