Article ID: | iaor20012132 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 7 |
Start Page Number: | 973 |
End Page Number: | 988 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2000 |
Journal: | Management Science |
Authors: | Ukovich Walter, Speranza Maria Grazia, Bertazzi Luca |
Keywords: | inventory, production, programming: transportation |
We consider the problem of shipping several products from an origin to a destination when a discrete set of shipping frequencies is available, in such a way that the sum of the transportation and inventory costs is minimized. This problem, which is known to be NP-hard, has applications in transportation planning and in location analysis. In this paper we derive dominance rules for the problem solutions that allow a tightening of the bounds on the problem variables and improve the efficiency of a known branch-and-bound algorithm. Moreover, we present some heuristics and compare them with two different modifications of an EOQ-type algorithm for the solution of the problem with continuous frequencies.