A Two-Phase Iterative Heuristic Approach for the Production Routing Problem

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 uncapacitated 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.