In the Petrol Station Replenishment Problem (PSRP) the aim is to jointly determine an allocation of petroleum products to tank truck compartments and to design delivery routes to stations. We describe an integrated exact algorithm for the PSRP. This algorithm was extensively tested on randomly generated data and on a real-life case arising in Eastern Quebec.

The Petrol Truck Loading Problem consists of assigning T different demands to C different truck compartments. Each compartment can deliver only one demand but a demand can be delivered by more than one compartment. Each demand is characterized by a minimum and a maximum quantity to deliver and the objective is to minimize the unused truck capacity. We provide a method to solve this NP-hard problem in a much faster way than solving the corresponding binary programming problem.

This paper presents a new bloc heuristic for the container loading problem. A container must be loaded with rectangular boxes. The boxes are first combined to form blocs which are stacked. Piles of boxes are next loaded side by side in sections. A series of sections corresponds to the final loading pattern. Different optimization procedures are used at four stages of the algorithm: Form the blocs, stack the blocs, loading a section with blocs, select the sections. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated by comparative tests on well known reference instances.