Modeling of a blending and marine transportation planning problem with fuzzy mixed-integer programming

Transportation management is an area that remains critical to overall logistics and supply chain success. The problem of multi-commodity, multi-period blending and marine transportation planning in a wheat supply chain is addressed in this paper. In real world problems, practical situations are often not well-defined and thus cannot be described precisely. Therefore fuzzy mathematical programming becomes a valuable extension of traditional crisp optimization models. This research resolves the blending and marine transportation planning problem using fuzzy mixed-integer programming (FMIP) method. Two types of fuzzy mathematical programming models are used. A real-life example is used to illustrate the potential savings which can be attained by using fuzzy models. Results obtained in this study clearly demonstrate that FMIP provides a better and more flexible way of representing the problem.