Joint SORG/CORMSIS/Third Sector SIG Seminar Event

Abstract: The major charities can spend around 20% of their income on logistics, collecting new donations from donation banks and recycling unsellable textiles via various outlets. This talk will describe the key learning outcomes from a project undertaken with Oxfam which installed remote monitoring sensors into a subset of their textile donation banks and using the fill levels reported daily, derived collection strategies using tabu search methods. These were based on a set of rules to only allow banks to become eligible for servicing once they had reached a specific fill level.

The problem was made more complex by the need for the collection vans to also visit Oxfam shops on a fixed schedule basis to remove unsold textiles.

Following live and simulated trials, the results suggested that time and distance savings of up to 30% over the current fixed schedules could be achieved when a minimum bank and shop fill level of between 50% and 60% was used as a collection trigger. Some of the outcomes from the project are now being developed commercially in the form of an app, to allow the area managers, shop managers and drivers to communicate and manage collection scheduling in a more dynamic way.