Optimizing petrol stations replenishment

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Most big North American petrol marketer companies subcontract the replenishment of their branded petrol stations to private petrol transportation companies. Often, the same transportation company services the stations of different brands. In Canada, the transportation cost of delivering petrol products from storage terminals to retailing petrol stations is estimated to be about 480 million $ in 2010. However the optimization of replenishment operations and networks of such transportation companies has received very little research effort. Actually, only six research papers dealing with this topic were published by Canadian researchers and six others by researchers from outside Canada. I am proud to be the coauthor of all the Canadian research publications especially as there is no other Canadian research team doing research in this field. The transportation company has to make a number of simultaneous and inter-related decisions; it must determine the routes for the delivery of all the demanded products, assign these routes to trucks, determine the time schedule for each of the trucks, determine the quantities to be delivered by each trip, and how to assign these quantities to the compartments of the truck selected for the trip. Transportation companies have also many other decisions to make. For example, the terminals to use for the deliveries, the fleet size and composition and its renewal, the location sites for their different trucks, etc. This research program will build upon the research already done to study these problems, provide appropriate decision systems and tools to solve them and build a prototype of a replenishment planning system that uses the developed tools. If we succeed to reduce the petrol replenishment transportation cost by 1%; this can lead to a gain of about 5 million dollars a year.