Solving of Inventory Routing Problem by Meta Heuristics with Supply Constraints

Abstract

Inventory-routing problem (IRP) is introduced in vendor managed inventory (VMI) concept. The importance of IRP is combining two elements of supply chain management. Indeed IRP integrates inventory control and vehicle routing problem.
In this research multi period IRP for a set of customer with considering transportation and shortage costs is investigated. Each customer faces a demand at a deterministic rate and one type. In addition in this problem there is a product supply limitation that there is no attention to this limitation in literature. The inventory of the customers are replenished by a fleet of heterogeneous vehicle of limited and various capacity. Unlike most of the problems in literature that several vehicle can visit one customer in a period, in this problem a customer will be visited no more than once in a time period. The problem has been solved by two methods that which of them contains two steps. In the first step, that is common between methods, the quantity of sent products for every customer is determined by a proposal fixed partition policy (FPP).Then the sequences of customers are determined by genetic algorithm and variable neighborhood search algorithm. Finally the methods are compared by two criteria, run time and the profit of dispatching. Since the inventory routing problem is a NP-hard problem, the solving method proposed in this study can be useful because the dispatching revenue is in reasonable rate and run time is quite satisfaction.

Keywords


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  • Receive Date: 07 September 2013
  • Revise Date: 23 October 2013
  • Accept Date: 26 October 2013
  • Publish Date: 11 March 2014