Supply Chain Lab Bulk Water Network Optimiser Lab Home
Toy demo · fictional operator · synthetic data

Plan every tanker, every spring, every day.

One engine decides which spring supplies which plant, which tanker carries each load and in what order, on the real road network. When demand jumps or a spring goes offline, it re-plans in seconds.

…more contribution per day than fixed shuttle lanes
…unserved demand
…empty running
…cost per kL delivered
01 · The challenge

Three constraints that fight each other every day

Supply

9 springs on three cost tiers (owned, leased and spot), each with a daily extraction licence cap.

Quality

Each bottling plant accepts water only from its nominated springs, so the cheapest spring is not always allowed.

Fleet

24/7 shifts, 28 to 60 kL tankers, road-access limits for long combinations and one or two loading bays per site.

02 · One day on the network

See the plan move

Press Animate day to watch every tanker. Click any blue spring to take it offline and the whole network re-plans around it.

Live network on real roads

Routing service unreachable: showing straight-line approximation and estimated distances.
Source (click to fail) Source offline Customer plant Empty leg Loaded leg Tanker (live position)
00:00
03 · Before and after

Fixed shuttle lanes versus the optimised plan

Computing…
04 · Try a scenario

Change the day, watch it re-plan

Every control re-solves the whole network live. Demand volumes and cost assumptions sit under Advanced assumptions.

WinterShoulderSummer peak
Tip: click any source marker on the map to simulate an outage and watch the network re-plan around it. Every control re-solves the network live.
Advanced assumptions: costs
05 · Under the hood

What the plan actually does

Every tanker, hour by hour

Empty Loading Loaded Unloading Waiting (bay queue) Now - animation time cursor

How hard each spring works

Share of each daily licence cap used by the optimised plan.

Where the water comes from

Spot water is the expensive recourse tier: the optimiser holds it back until owned and leased licence caps bind (summer peak or outages), a common three-tier procurement structure.

Which spring may supply which plant

Customers accept water only from nominated sources (taste/composition). Sites marked ▲ cannot receive A-double combinations due to road-access restrictions.

06 · Does it survive a bad day?

200 simulated days with traffic and delays

Each plan is frozen, then replayed over 200 synthetic operating days with lognormal travel-time and service-time noise plus heavy-tail traffic incidents (fixed seed, reproducible). Bay queues re-form under the realised times; vehicles that overrun the shift window by more than 1 h drop their remaining loads. This is how we test whether a plan survives contact with reality before promising it.
Computing…
07 · What the engine handles

Real operating rules, not a simplified model

Full-load pickup & delivery Source–customer water-profile compatibility Owned / leased / spot procurement tiers Daily extraction licence caps Heterogeneous fleet 28–60 kL PBS / A-double road-access limits Driver shift caps incl. handover Load & unload service times Single profit objective: income up, cost down together Empty-repositioning minimisation (inside the cost term) Outage recourse Real road distance matrix (OSRM)
How the baseline and the optimiser work

Baseline: dedicated shuttle lanes, the common manual-planning pattern: each tanker is locked to one customer lane with its traditional sources and shuttles back and forth all shift. Both modes queue for limited loading/unloading bays (Springs A and E and the metro plants have 2 bays; other sites 1), so congestion and waiting emerge naturally as demand and service times rise. Optimised: a multi-start randomised construction (GRASP-style, 12 starts) followed by inter-route local search - swap and relocation of planned jobs between vehicles on the dispatch board (no water is ever transferred between tankers) - jointly choosing procurement tier, source, vehicle configuration and job sequence. Distances and travel times come from the OSRM road network matrix (heavy-vehicle time approximated as car +8%; straight-line fallback if offline). This in-browser heuristic demonstrates the concept; the production model is an exact time-space MILP solved in Gurobi with a tactical allocation layer.

Your network, planned the same way.

This demo runs on illustrative data. With your springs, plants, fleet and costs, the same engine plans real days and tests them before you commit.

Talk to us
Prepared by Dr Shahrooz Shahparvari, School of Accounting, Information Systems and Supply Chain, RMIT University.
All demand, cost, capacity and fleet figures on this page are synthetic demonstration values for a fictional operator. They are not company data and must not be quoted as such. Site locations are indicative teaching locations only. Basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors; routing via public OSRM/FOSSGIS services (no service guarantee).