Optimizing log transportation in the Argentinean forest industry by column generation

Abstract

A column generation based algorithm for optimally solving a daily log routing problem in the Argentinean forest industry is presented in this work. Minimum-cost truck-routes are dynamically generated by two complementary pricing procedures within this algorithm. The proposed decomposition procedure is able to provide optimal and or near optimal transportation plans for large instances found in the context of the argentine forest industry which considers several modelling features usually no considered in standard OR routing problems. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on several instances from the literature and on a realistic large scale example.