A MILP-based approach to manage logistics in large industrial gas supply chains

The high competitiveness between companies dedicated to the production and distribution of industrial gases make necessary to optimize their activities in order to improve their profitability. This paper addresses the production routing problem (PRP) of an industrial gas supply chain (SC). The work proposes a MILP-based approach to deal with this problem. The framework seeks to improve the company's profit by optimizing production and distribution activities. For the distribution part, a set of feasible routes are previously generated and selected. Then, considering only the selected routes, the model chooses the best combination of them to satisfy all the constraints. It is important to note that the model takes into account the effect of lead time on production and distribution decisions. Finally, a real case study is presented and solved. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reasonable CPU times.