This paper describes the development of a scheduling tool to help a Canadian shipping company optimize the routing and scheduling of their ships and allocate the right assets to the right cargo. The problem can be formulated as a variant of the vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery, and it is solved by adapting a tabu search heuristic originally developed for the latter problem. The decision support tool is currently implemented within the company, and it is used by the scheduling team to validate assumptions and schedule their fleet over short- to long-term planning horizons. A user interface lets the users visualize results and carry out manual changes to the schedule. The decision support tool yields important savings compared to manual planning practices that were previously in place at the company.

本文介绍了调度工具的开发，以帮助加拿大的航运公司优化其船舶的路线和调度，并将正确的资产分配给正确的货物。可以将该问题表述为具有接送的车辆路径问题的变体，并且可以通过针对该问题最初开发的禁忌搜索启发法来解决该问题。决策支持工具当前在公司内部实施，调度团队使用该工具来验证假设并在短期至长期计划范围内调度其机队。用户界面使用户可以可视化结果并手动更改时间表。与公司以前采用的手动计划做法相比，决策支持工具可节省大量资金。