Allocation of trips to trucks operating from a single terminal

Abstract The problem of allocating a set of trips to a mixed fleet of trucks operating from a single terminal is analyzed. Such a problem is often faced in regional distribution of large volume products where a truck may be assigned several closed trips from the same origin during a work shift. The cost of delivery is minimized using a mixed binary formulation for smaller size problems, and two heuristics for larger size problems. The heuristics provide resuts which are usually within 1% of the lower bound on the costs (derived from a relaxed LP), with minimal computing resources.