Patent ID: 7797205

Claim:
An apparatus for determining the transportation of bulk products, comprising: (i) a processing device; (ii) a memory device storing data containing: (a) an identification of a plurality of supply locations and a plurality of demand locations; (b) at each supply location: identification of one or more supply streams of bulk products, and the monetary values of the bulk products from the supply streams; (c) at each demand location: identification of one or more demand streams of bulk products, and the monetary values of the bulk products that meet the property specification requirements of the demand streams; (d) identification of a fleet of vehicles that can load bulk products at the supply locations and discharge bulk products at the demand locations; (e) the capacity of each vehicle in the fleet; and (f) the transportation costs related to the transport of bulk products from the supply locations to the demand locations; (iii) a computer application executable by the processing device to formulate a mathematical model using the stored data in the memory device, wherein the mathematical model can be solved for feasible bulk product allocation, transportation routing and transportation vehicle/route scheduling for the movement of bulk products from supply locations to demand locations within a planning horizon, wherein the model comprises an objective function for net profit margin and a plurality of constraints including inventory constraints at the supply locations and the demand locations, and wherein the objective function for net profit margin comprises the sum of the monetary values of the bulk products discharged to the demand streams, including specification adjusted valuations of the discharged bulk products that are blended from different supply streams, minus the sum of the monetary values of the bulk products loaded from the supply streams and costs including the costs related to the transportation of the bulk products between the supply locations and the demand locations; and (iv) a calculation engine comprising a solver operable by the processing device to obtain a solution to the mathematical program model that maximizes the objective function for net profit margin.