  Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) manufacture, inventory and transport
new vehicles to franchised dealers. These franchised dealers inventory and sell
new vehicles to end users. OEMs rely on logistics companies with a special type
of truck called an auto-carrier to transport the vehicles to the dealers. The
process of vehicle distribution has a common challenge. This challenge involves
determining routes, and the way to load the vehicles onto each auto-carrier.In
this paper, we present a heuristic to determine the route for each auto-carrier
based on the dealers' locations, and subsequently, a branch-and-price algorithm
to obtain optimal solutions to the loading problem based on the generated
route. The loading problem considers the actual dimensions of the vehicles, and
the restrictions imposed by vehicle manufacturers and governmental agencies on
the loading process. We perform extensive computational experiments for the
loading problem using real-world instances, and our results are benchmarked
with a holistic model to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
For the largest instance comprising of 600 vehicles, the proposed method
computes an optimal solution for the loading problem within a stipulated
runtime.
