Logistics Optimization: A Strategic Approach to Sustainability and Operational Efficiency

Abstract

Extending the life of products is one of the pillars of LIPOR’s circular economy agenda. This dissertation supports that goal by optimizing the daily logistics of GIRA, LIPOR’s service responsible for home pickups and ecocenter drop-off for reusable goods, and by specifying a traceability solution for the Logistics Center.

An optimization tool was then developed to tackle the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem, featuring specific municipalities for each day of the week, home collections, optional and urgent ecocenter visits, and capacity constraints. With the support of OR-Tools, five classical heuristics and three metaheuristics were benchmarked on 14 standard CVRP instances, and Tabu Search proved to be the most reliable method. It outperformed the other methods with a 3.09 % optimality gap across all instances within a 300s time limit, and it demonstrated consistent behaviour.

Then three different routing policies were proposed: (i) collection of all ecocenters integrated with the home pickups, (ii) the most distant ecocenters are integrated with the customers’ collection, but there is priority of full containers, and (iii) the visits to ecocenter are only triggered at 80 % fill level. The routes are executed daily by the optimization tool, and it outputs a driver report containing all the stops and a QR code that launches the full route in Google Maps.

To track the items when they arrive at the Logistics Center, a barcode traceability system was proposed. Barcodes were preferred over RFID because of their minimal cost, their practicality, and their ease of attachment to heterogeneous items. Together, the optimized routing and barcode tracking framework improve GIRA operations.