I'm working with our IT group to develop an optimizer for logistics operations. The basic design is that it will look at shipments, run a search for additional shipments originating with in XX miles of the previous shipments destination, and link them together in a loop. It will continue to do this until it hits a user defined set of shipment legs where the loop ends at or close to 1st shipment origin.
The issue we are facing is that the materials we ship are chemicals, which can have interactions if placed in a tank that contained XX chemical before it. The obvious solution is to use a different tank or wash it out, but we also need it to compute solutions prior to that.
My problem is, currently, there is no way on the market to do that prior product optimization.
The question is: Is there some kind of logic table function I can write that will allow the optimizer to see an element in the data set (say, Product Family of 1) that will pull from a product database containing predefined product families (i.e. PF 1 = Chemicals A1-B7, PF 2 = Chemical B8-J8, etc.) and then ping off of a logic table that defines a do not ship with list (i.e. PF 1 cannot ship if PF 2 was on the previous leg.
