Enriching Simheuristics with Petri net models: Potential applications to logistics and supply chain management

Abstract

Some classic and complex problems in Operations Research consist of simplified versions of real logistic and supply chain management applications. One common and successful, but approximated approach for coping with these problems considers the system of interest isolated from its environment. In such a case, the links to the real world may be reduced to a set of parameters associated with probabilistic distributions. Simheuristics is a solving methodology able to provide efficiently near-optimal solutions for these constrained problems. This paper presents a methodology combining Simheuristics with a Petri net model, describing the environment of a logistic system. An extended version of the capacitated vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands is stated adding a Petri net model. Petri nets are widely used for modeling parallelism and concurrency, providing a realistic description of this environment, which may change the behavior of the isolated system and the scope of the decision-making.