A decentralized two-level transportation problem in a housing material manufacturer: Interactive fuzzy programming approach

In this paper, we deal with a transportation problem in a housing material manufacturer and derive a satisfactory solution to the problem by taking into account not only the degree of satisfaction with respect to objectives of the housing material manufacturer but also those of two forwarding agents to which the housing material manufacturer entrusts transportation of products. The two forwarding agents handle the regular transportation and the small lot transportation, and each of them assigns work force, the transformation tasks properly. There are two objectives in the housing material manufacturer: one is to minimize the transportation cost and the other is to minimize the opportunity loss with respect to transportation time. The objectives of the two forwarding agents are to maximize their profits. We formulate the transportation planning and work force assignment problem as a decentralized two-level integer programming problem, and derive a satisfactory solution by applying an interactive fuzzy programming method.