Original scientific paper

https://doi.org/10.31803/tg-20250424185350

Optimizing Milkrun Routes: Heuristic Approach for Minimizing Transportation Loops

Peter Veres ; University of Miskolc, Egyetem str. 1, HU-3515 Miskolc-Egyetemvaros, Hungary *

* Corresponding author.

Abstract

Milkrun systems serve as the backbone of material supply for multi-line or parallel manufacturing production, ensuring synchronized and efficient logistics. Despite their importance, route optimization is still largely done manually, leading to inefficiencies. If too few routes are used, transportation time increases, and individual vehicles become overloaded, which is a common issue in current practices. Finding the optimal number of routes is a complex NP-hard problem, requiring advanced computational approaches. While assignment matrices are often available and useful for direct transport allocation, they are not used for optimizing milkrun loops. To address this, a heuristic-based model has been developed that optimizes the number of routes while considering travel length and vehicle capacity. The model and case study integrates genetic algorithms to explore feasible solutions efficiently, balancing the trade-off between too many and too few routes. The proposed approach improves both cost-effectiveness and service reliability in production logistics.

Keywords

assignment problem; heuristic optimisation; milkrun; production logistics; route planning

Hrčak ID:

348866

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/348866

Publication date:

15.9.2026.

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