Vehicle scheduling and dispatching of ready mixed concrete

The aim of this paper is to present an approach to improve the operation of ready mixed concrete production and to decrease the cost of the whole delivery process. In the paper, description about the ready mixed concrete industry is firstly demonstrated. And the peculiar characteristics of ready mixed concrete which make the dispatching problem different from traditional vehicle routing problem are described in detail. Then based on the existing research, one mathematical model of the vehicles dispatching of ready mixed concrete with hard time windows is developed. Vehicles mentioned in this paper are composed of two parts: one is the mixer vehicle used for only delivering concrete and the other is the pump, utilized for concrete unloading and casting. In the model, special focus is given to the pump. At last, one approach applying genetic algorithm is presented, followed by some simulation results.