Scheduling of dispatching Ready Mixed Concrete trucks trough Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization

The scheduling of dispatching Ready Mixed Concrete (RMC) trucks is a tough issue to RMC plants since so many constraints, such as RMC time limitation, limited amount of trucks, zero RMC inventory and the uncertainty of RMC demand, are taken into consideration. In this paper, we proposed a systematic approach including a mathematic model for the scheduling of dispatching RMC trucks, an improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) approach to solve the model by introducing swapping operators, a software based on the approach which is presented for scheduling of dispatching RMC trucks. Finally with practical instances we proved the approach could obtain better solution to the issue.