In the context of the DigiLab4U international project, this paper describes a simulation-based serious game that can be used as a virtual teaching lab in higher education courses, especially in Industrial and Systems Engineering, Data Science, Management Science and Operations Research, as well as Computer Science. The learning activity focuses on understanding distribution logistics problems related to transportation optimization using different techniques. These optimization challenges include the vehicle routing problem, the arc routing problem, and the team orienteering problem. As a result of the learning process in the virtual lab, it is expected that students acquire competencies and skills related to logistics and transportation challenges as well as problem-solving. These competencies and skills can be precious for students’ future careers, since they increase students’ analytical skills, capacity to understand heuristic-based algorithms, teamwork and interdisciplinary communication skills, programming skills, and statistical abilities. A preliminary version of this training activity has already been used in MSc and PhD courses held at universities in Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal.

Many real-life applications of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) occur in scenarios subject to uncertainty or dynamic conditions. Thus, for instance, traveling times or customers’ demands might be better modeled as random variables than as deterministic values. Likewise, traffic conditions could evolve over time, synchronization issues should need to be considered, or a real-time re-optimization of the routing plan can be required as new data become available in a highly dynamic environment. Clearly, different solving approaches are needed to efficiently cope with such a diversity of scenarios. After providing an overview of current trends in VRPs, this paper reviews a set of heuristic-based algorithms that have been designed and employed to solve VRPs with the aforementioned properties. These include simheuristics for stochastic VRPs, learnheuristics and discrete-event heuristics for dynamic VRPs, and agile optimization heuristics for VRPs with real-time requirements.

This paper presents a novel lean tool called Project Time Deployment (PTD) whose objectives are to classify, analyse, and eliminate losses in order to reduce production lead time in Engineer-to-Order (ETO) environments. By combining two already known approaches, i.e. the Manufacturing Critical-path Time and the Manufacturing Cost Deployment, PTD identifies the critical losses affecting the project, focusing on the business processes where causal losses occur, and providing opportunities for greater efficiency and effectiveness by reducing or even eliminating them. In ETO projects, the lead time and respecting deadlines are of paramount importance and they are often threatened by several different losses that are difficult to compare. Companies thus need a tool to identify the losses and the tasks where they occur, quantifying them in terms of a single dimension: the time. PTD was designed using a methodology based on four steps: analysis of current solutions, concept design and prototype, proof of concept and validation, and definition of future researches. It was also validated in an industrial implementation concerning an Engineering, Procurement & Construction company operating in the steel industry, and led to an approximate 24% reduction in lead time.

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a probabilistic technique inspired by the behavior of ants for solving computational problems that may be reduced to finding the best path through a graph. Some species of ants deposit pheromone on the ground to mark some favorable paths that should be used by other members of the colony. Ant colony optimization implements a similar mechanism for solving optimization problems. In this paper a warm-up procedure for the ACO is proposed. During the warm-up, the pheromone matrix is initialized to provide an efficient new starting point for the algorithm, so that it can obtain the same (or better) results with fewer iterations. The warm-up is based exclusively on the graph, which, in most applications, is given and does not need to be recalculated every time before executing the algorithm. In this way, it can be made only once, and it speeds up the algorithm every time it is used from then on. The proposed solution is validated on a set of traveling salesman problem instances, and in the simulation of a real industrial application for the routing of pickers in a manual warehouse. During the validation, it is compared with other ACO adopting a pheromone initialization technique, and the results show that, in most cases, the adoption of the proposed warm-up allows the ACO to obtain the same or better results with fewer iterations.