Exact and Meta-heuristic methods for the concrete delivery problem

The Concrete Delivery Problem consists of the delivery of this product to different construction sites, defined as clients. These demands a certain amount which has to be totally satisfied and for each one of them there is a time window within concrete must be delivered. The product is transported by a heterogeneous fleet of trucks and due to their capacity limits, deliveries must be split. On the other hand, to assure the proper bonding of concrete layers, a maximum time lag between consecutive deliveries to the same client is required. The objective, in this case, is to maximize the number of satisfied customers, according to their demand. As distributors of concrete possess a finite capacity it is expected some clients might not be served during the operation. In this project, formulations proposed in the literature for this problem are studied, and based on them a new and more compact formulation is proposed as well as a metaheuristic approach capable of deal with larger instances and give solutions in shorter computation times.