A Aplicação de um modelo matemático na resolução de um problema de carregamento de paletes

Global competitiveness has been increased significantly in the last decade and, as consequence, companies are always looking for developing better processes in supply chain operations in order to maintain their competitive costs and keep themselves in the business. Logistics operations represent a large part of the product's final cost. Transportation can represent more than fifty percent of final cost sometimes. The solutions for cutting and packing problems consist in simple and low investment actions, as enhancing the arrangement of the transported load in order to decrease both material and room wastes. As per the presented reasons, the objective of this paper is to show and analyze a real application of a mathematical model to solve a manufacturer pallet-loading problem, comparing results from the model execution and the solution proposed by the company studied. This study will not only find the best arrangement to load pallets (which will optimize storage and transportation process), but also to check the effectiveness of existing modeling in the literature. For this study a computational package was used, which consists of a modeling language GAMS with the CPLEX optimization solver and two other existing software in the market, all of them indicating that an accurate mathematical model for solving this kind of problem in a two-dimensional approach is difficult to be found, in addition to a long execution time. However, the study and the software utilization indicate that the problem would be easily solved by heuristics in a shorter execution time