Dynamic milk-run OEM operations in over-congested traffic conditions

• Traditional OEM routes to collect components very often show unperformed tasks.
• Large cities show occasional over-congested traffic conditions.
• A dynamic alternative is to use auxiliary vehicles to perform exceeding tasks.
• We use probabilistic sequential analysis to foresee urban traffic surges.
• The dynamic approach substantially reduces unperformed collecting tasks.

Dynamic vehicle routing problems have received increasing attention in the literature due to the rapid IT evolution as well as advances in computing and modelling techniques. In areas subject to critical and often unpredictable traffic congestions, logistics operators often allocate excessive number of collecting tasks to their vehicles, generating unperformed activities due to OEM JIT time constraints and thus violating contractual obligations assumed with their clients. In this paper, a dynamic OEM picking-up (milk-run) routing problem is analysed, in which tasks that likely will exceed the time limit in a route are assigned to supplementary vehicles, thus forming auxiliary dynamic routes formed with the transferred tasks originated from the regular trucks. To solve the problem, a genetic algorithm model was developed in association with a simulation program intended to define some relevant probabilistic parameters. The results have shown that the dynamic formulation considerably improves the service level when compared with the static version.