A PSO-GA method to solve a partial shipment and scheduling problem

The partial shipment in an inbound transportation process is considered in this paper, in which a given collection of components from a list must be delivered from several possible providers (origins) to one plant (destination). The partial shipment and scheduling problem can be reduced to a vehicle routing problem (VRP) with a variable size fleet of trucks. Based on actual logistics data and business process, a new optimization objective is defined in this paper. A genetic algorithm (GA) with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) operator is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Finally, a series of numerical quantifications are analyzed to illustrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm.