Real-World Problem of Delivery Planning for the LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) Distributor - Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Task:

Background
In this assignment you will address a real-world problem of delivery planning for the LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) distributor. In the areas where mains gas for heating purposes is not available, LPG is the closest alternative. It has the lowest carbon emissions per kWh out of all fossil fuels available in rural areas, does not pose any ground or water pollution hazards and can be used for both heating and cooking. LPG distribution companies source the fuel from major oil refineries and deliver it to the bulk customers by a fleet tanker lorries like the one in Figure 1.

Figure

1. Tanker lorry.

You have been employed by SaO Gas Ltd as data scientists. You are to produce delivery schedules for the fleet of 25 tanker lorries operating from 4 depots in the country of Optilandia (which surprisingly use £ as their currency), minimising the overall cost of delivery for the distributor under certain constraints.
SaO Gas Ltd operates three types of tanker as shown in Table 1.
Tanker type Capacity [tonnes] Cost per mile [£] Cost per mile per tonne [£]
Small 5 1.00 1.50
Medium 12 1.50 1.00
Large 22 2.00 0.50

Table 1. Tanker lorries operated by SaO Gas Ltd.

As an example, a large tanker can be loaded with up to 22 tonnes of LPG at one of the depots (you can assume that depots never run out of gas). It costs the distributor £2 per mile to use the large tanker (even if it is empty) plus £0.50 per mile for every tonne of LPG the tanker carries. So, a large tanker with 10 tonnes of LPG travelling 20 miles costs: 20 [miles] x (2.00 [£] + 10 [tonnes] x 0.50 [£]) = 140 [£]. However, after dropping 2 tonnes of LPG at a customer, the next 20 miles travelled will cost less as the lorry is now lighter: 20 [miles] x (2.00 [£] + 8 [tonnes] x 0.50 [£]) = 120 [£].

SaO Gas Ltd operates from four depots as shown in Table 2. The road network of Optilandia has been depicted in Figure 2, with the red dots denoting locations of the four depots, and the green dots denoting locations of SaO Gas customers.
Depot Location ID Small tankers Medium tankers Large tankers
1 #523 2 2 1
2 #124 3 3 2
3 #373 3 4 3
4 #116 1 1 0

Optimisation problems
There are two problems you should address:
1. Schedule LPG delivery to all customers in order to fully fill their tanks while minimising the overall cost of delivery. There are no additional constrains apart from the tanker lorry capacity – a lorry can for example visit any of the depots multiple times in order to load additional gas.

2. Schedule LPG delivery in order to maximise the amount of gas delivered to the customers, while minimising the overall cost of delivery (including any potential penalties! - see below) and while observing the following constraints in addition to tanker lorry capacity:

a. Each lorry can travel up to 250 miles
b. Each lorry can only stop up to 5 times, this includes customer deliveries and any additional visits to the depot
c. Each lorry must end its journey in one of the depots (this doesn’t count towards the 5 stop limit and doesn’t have to be the depot from which the lorry started its journey)
d. If you don’t deliver to customers who have less than 15% of gas in their tanks, SaO Gas Ltd will incur a penalty of £1,000 for each such customer

This assignment tests your ability to:
1. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of search and optimisation techniques and their applications.
2. Demonstrate critical awareness of the strengths and limitations of various stochastic search and optimisation techniques.
3. Implement search and optimisation solutions to real-world problems using modern algorithms and software libraries.
4. Design search and optimisation experiments and conduct rigorous statistical analysis of the results.

This Management Assignment has been solved by our Management  Experts at My Uni Papers. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.