Woodler

Woodler is a local company that prepares and distributes wood to be used in building and carpentry. They have one large distribution center (DC) and many stores. Stores are located in the city and don't have much storage capacity. So, Woodler also owns many trucks that they use to fulfill the stores on a daily basis. Because demand is very volatile (it varies with the weather, school calendar, etc.), they often have to rent extra trucks to deliver daily loads.

Renting extra trucks is expensive though. But to avoid renting trucks, Woodler must plan their distribution very well, which is not an easy task because trucks must be small (so they can circulate in the city), and timber is a heavy type of load and takes up a lot of space.

Because traffic is heavy, each truck leaves the DC in the morning and only returns in the afternoon, not having enough time for a second trip.

Placement of orders from the stores closed by 5 PM of the previous day. This means that Woodler knows in advance exactly how much to deliver to each store. So the goal is to deliver the demand of every store at minimum cost, i.e., with the minimum number of trucks.

A sample data set is provided below.

This and other data sets are available for download in the Woodler Repository.