| Article ID: | iaor20164333 |
| Volume: | 49 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Start Page Number: | 784 |
| End Page Number: | 795 |
| Publication Date: | Nov 2015 |
| Journal: | Transportation Science |
| Authors: | Archetti C, Feillet D, Absi N, Dauzre-Prs S |
| Keywords: | transportation: general, heuristics, combinatorial optimization, inventory, decision, production, simulation, programming: travelling salesman, vehicle routing & scheduling, distribution |
This paper investigates the integrated optimization of production, distribution, and inventory decisions related to supplying multiple retailers from a central production facility. A single‐item capacitated lot‐sizing problem is defined for optimizing production decisions and inventory management. The optimization of daily distribution is modeled as a traveling salesman problem or a vehicle routing problem depending on the number of vehicles. A two‐phase iterative method, from which several heuristics are derived, is proposed that iteratively focuses on lot‐sizing and distribution decisions. Computational results show that our best heuristic outperforms existing methods.