a two-phase hybrid heuristic method for a multi-depot inventory-routing problem

the inventory routing problem (irp) arises in the context of vendor-managed systems. this problem addresses jointly solving an inventory management problem and a vehicle routing problem. in this paper, we consider a multi-depot multi-vehicle inventory routing problem in which suppliers produce one type of product to be delivered to customers during a finite time horizon. we propose a two-phase hybrid heuristic method based on variable neighborhood search (vns) and the simulated annealing (sa) algorithm to solve the problem. in the first phase, the initial solution is generated, then the solution is improved iteratively in the second phase. the solutions are then compared with and without using the local search procedures. computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. the inventory routing problem (irp) arises in the context of vendor-managed systems. this problem addresses jointly solving an inventory management problem and a vehicle routing problem. in this paper, we consider a multi-depot multi-vehicle inventory routing problem in which suppliers produce one type of product to be delivered to customers during a finite time horizon.