An integrated inventory-routing system for multi-item joint replenishment with limited vehicle capacity

An integrated inventory-routing system for multi-item joint replenishment with limited vehicle capacity

0.00 Avg rating0 Votes
Article ID: iaor200632
Country: Germany
Volume: 32
Issue: 1
Start Page Number: 93
End Page Number: 118
Publication Date: May 2005
Journal: Journal of Global Optimization
Authors: , , ,
Keywords: programming: linear
Abstract:

In this paper, we develop a mathematical programming approach for coordinating inventory and transportation decisions in an inbound commodity collection system. In particular, we consider a system that consists of a set of geographically dispersed suppliers that manufacture one or more non-identical items, and a central warehouse that stocks these items. The warehouse faces a constant and deterministic demand for the items from outside retailers. The items are collected by a fleet of vehicles that are dispatched from the central warehouse. The vehicles are capacitated, and must also satisfy a frequency constraint. Adopting a policy in which each vehicle always collects the same set of items, we formulate the inventory-routing problem of minimizing the long-run average inventory and transportation costs as a set partitioning problem. We employ a column generation approach to determine a lower bound on the total costs, and develop a branch-and-price algorithm that finds the optimal assignment of items to vehicles. We also propose greedy constructive heuristics, and develop a very large-scale neighborhood search algorithm to find near-optimal solutions for the problem. Computational tests are performed on a set of randomly generated problem instances.

Reviews

Required fields are marked *. Your email address will not be published.