Integrated Production, Inventory and Delivery Problems: Complexity and Algorithms

Integrated Production, Inventory and Delivery Problems: Complexity and Algorithms

0.00 Avg rating0 Votes
Article ID: iaor2017520
Volume: 29
Issue: 2
Start Page Number: 232
End Page Number: 250
Publication Date: May 2017
Journal: INFORMS Journal on Computing
Authors: , ,
Keywords: inventory, vehicle routing & scheduling, production, combinatorial optimization, heuristics
Abstract:

We consider several integrated production, inventory, and delivery problems that arise in a number of practical settings where customer orders have pre‐specified delivery time windows. These orders are first processed in a plant and then delivered to the customers by transporters (such as trains and air flights) which have fixed delivery departure times. If an order is completed but not immediately delivered by a transporter, the order is kept temporarily in inventory, which incurs an inventory cost. There is a delivery cost for delivering an order, which varies with the departure time. Given a set of orders, the objective is to find an integrated schedule for processing the orders, keeping finished orders in inventory if necessary, and delivering them to the customers such that the total inventory and delivery cost is minimum. We consider two classes of problems: where order delivery is splittable and where order delivery is nonsplittable. For each of the problems considered, we study its computational complexity by either showing that the problem is NP‐hard or proposing an algorithm that can find an optimal solution. For the two most general problems, we show that any polynomial time algorithm has an arbitrarily bad worst‐case performance bound, and propose combined column generation and tabu search heuristic algorithms that can find near optimal solutions for them in a reasonable computational time. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2016.0726.

Reviews

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 Your email address will not be published.