The exact solution of several classes of inventory-routing problems. (English) Zbl 1349.90016

Coelho, Leandro C.; Laporte, Gilbert

Comput. Oper. Res. 40, No. 2, 558-565 (2013).

Summary: In order to be competitive companies need to take advantage of synergistic interactions between different decision areas. Two of these are related to the distribution and inventory management processes. Inventory-Routing Problems (IRPs) arise when inventory and routing decisions must be made simultaneously, which yields a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a branch-and-cut algorithm for the exact solution of several classes of IRPs. Specifically, we solve the multi-vehicle IRP with a homogeneous and a heterogeneous fleet, the IRP with transshipment options, and the IRP with added consistency features. We perform an extensive computational analysis on benchmark instances.

MSC:

90B05	Inventory, storage, reservoirs
90B06	Transportation, logistics and supply chain management
90C57	Polyhedral combinatorics, branch-and-bound, branch-and-cut

Keywords:

inventory-routing; vehicle routing; inventory management; multi-vehicle; transshipment; consistency; branch-and-cut