Supporting real-time decision-making in logistics and transportation by combining simulation with heuristics

Supporting decision making in logistics and transportation is one of the most fruitful application areas of simulation and optimization techniques. In a global world, many enterprises need to perform complex procurement and delivery activities. Usually, these problems have an intricate nature, being NP-hard in most cases, which means that heuristic-based optimization approaches are necessary to deal with reallife and large-scale instances whenever a high-quality solution is needed in a short amount of time. Examples of these problems include many variants of the wellknown vehicle routing problem, the facility location problem, and the arc routing problem. We will discuss here the role played by Monte Carlo simulation in a suitable mixture with skewed probability distributions to enrich the performance developed by heuristic-based constructive methods. Some examples will highlight the efficiency of this simple yet powerful approach.