Digitization of supply chain routing decisions for freight transportation
Identifying an optimal routing, that ensures a delivery passage between suppliers and vendors, with a minimum cost while respecting the various constraints (including shortest delivery, availability of fleets and routes, traffic, etc.), could be a challenging task. This is mainly due to the need to solve a combinatorial optimization problem with discrete choices of pathways and routes that could become an NP-hard problem. Researchers and practitioners have adopted heuristic approaches to simplify the solution process. With the availability of large datasets, practitioners are increasingly looking into developing intelligent routing algorithms that learn from the data and extract rules for optimal routing decisions. The aim of this R&D project is to conduct research on digitization of routing practices in order to identify opportunities for upgrading a routing decision-making platform, previously developed by Hitek Logistics,