Research On Integrated Scheduling Of Ready Mixed Concrete Production And Delivery For A Single Plant

The industry of ready mixed concrete has developed very rapidly, and become morebeneficial in marketing and easier to control in procedure, which has also motivated everyimprovement of the companies. However, this also provides fiercer competitions.Therefore, how to improve the efficiency of management and the utilization rate ofresources has been a new challenge to all the companies of this industry.Systematic analysis of the production, delivery, unloading and casting of ready mixedconcrete has been proposed in the paper. Based on the idea of combining the RMCproduction and vehicle scheduling together, an integrated scheduling model of RMCproduction and delivery with time window for a single plant is introduced. The vehiclesconsist of trucks, which are used to deliver the concrete, and pumps that assist theunloading and casting operation of RMC. Real-coded schema is applied into the solutionof genetic algorithm. Genetic operations contain elitist strategy selection, two-pointcrossover and inversion mutation. Results from the solution can obtain time lists of RMCproduction, vehicles departure, vehicles arrival, RMC unloading and casting, vehiclesreturn as well as the sequences of construction sites for RMC production, vehicles fordeliveries.Meanwhile, the contrast of results from genetic algorithm and results from discreteevent simulation method based on the prior rules is demonstrated. Results from geneticalgorithm are better. Considering that the original result relies on the unvaried parameterslike number of vehicles and rates of penalties, more simulation tests are carried out. Thesensitive analysis on number of vehicles, rates of penalties and time windows providesdecision support to schedulers and they could choose the optimal solution under thecondition of available resources. So the profit level and management efficiency of theRMC plant could be improved.