A heuristic to solve the weekly log-truck scheduling problem

We present in this article the log-truck scheduling problem, which combine routing and scheduling of trucks with some specific constraints related to the canadian forestry context. This problem includes aspects such as pick-up and delivery, multiple products, inventory stock, multiple supply points and multiple demand points. We developped a decomposed approach to solve the weekly problem, in two phases. At the first phase we use a tabu search algorithm to solve an integer problem in order to determine the destinations of full truckloads from forest areas to woodmills. At the second phase, we make use of a standard local search algorithm to schedule the daily transportation of logs. This approach has been implemented using COMET 0.07 that use the concept of constraint-based local search. We tested our method on a set of industrial cases from forest companies in canada