Application of Milk-Run Method for Inbound Transportation of Stamped-Metal Raw Material for Power Supply Manufacturing Plants

This research studied the application of the milk-run method for inbound transportation of stamped-metal raw material for power supply manufacture. The research was indeed conducted to mitigate the problem of high transportation cost due to excessively low raw material carrying load on trucks. Ant colony optimization method was applied to identify the shortest transportation routes; input data were from the transportation records of 7 suppliers. Milk-run transportation employing the developed heuristics could decrease (1) the average number of trucks per day from 18 to 4 (78% reduction); (2) the number of transportation trips from 1,059 to 341 (68% reduction) and (3) the total transportation distance from 59,804 to 45,622 kilometers (24% reduction).