Vendor managed inventory replenishment is a business practice in which vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished. The inventory routing problem addresses the coordination of inventory management and transportation. The ability to solve the inventory routing problem contributes to the realization of the potential savings in invento...

The Inventory Location-Routing Problem with deterministic demand can be seen as an approach to both optimize a supply chain design and minimize its operational costs. This problem considers that vehicles might deliver products to more than one retailer per route and that inventory management decisions are included for a multi-depot, multi-retailer systemwith storage capacity over a discrete tim...

In this paper, a new practical solution approach based on randomized local search is presented for tackling a real-life inventory routing problem. Inventory routing refers to the optimization of transportation costs for the replenishment of customers’ inventories: based on consumption forecasts, the vendor organizes delivery routes. Our model takes into account pickups, time windows, drivers’ s...

This paper presents a column generation algorithm for solving combined vehicle and inventory problems. This problem is based on the idea of coordinating customer inventory levels through a minimum routing cost. This is a combinatory decision problem since vehicle routing and inventory problems, are combined. Using the column generation method, we can iteratively generate interesting routes to t...

This paper presents an extensive computational study of simple, but prominent matheuristics (i.e., heuristics that rely on mathematical programming models) to find high quality ship schedules and inventory policies for a class of maritime inventory routing problems. Our computational experiments are performed on a set of the publicly available MIRPLib instances. This class of inventory routing ...

Logistic activities, from a certain point of view, are often structured around two concepts, the transportation of goods and the management of the same goods. Of course, these two activities are highly interlinked. It is possible to combine at the same time the problem of defining the amount of goods that have to be shipped (the Inventory Management problem – the quantity decision) and the rout...

We consider the following two deterministic inventory optimization problems over a finite planning horizon T with non-stationary demands. • Submodular Joint Replenishment Problem. This involves multiple item types and a single retailer who faces demands. In each time step, any subset of item-types can be ordered incurring a joint ordering cost which is submodular. Moreover, items can be held in...

Many logistic activities are concerned with linking material flows among companies and processes. In such applications, we find a combination of quantity decisions, e. g. the amount of goods shipped (Inventory Management), and routing decisions as tackled in the area of Vehicle Routing. Clearly, both areas intersect to a considerable degree, complicating the solution of such problems. Recently,...

Many real-world optimization problems today are multi-objective multi-constraint generalizations of NP-hard problems. A classic case we study in this paper is the Inventory Routing Problem with Time Windows (IRPTW). IRPTW considers inventory costs across multiple instances of Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The latter is in turn extended with time-windows constraints from the...

The production routing problem (PRP) considers the coordination of production, inventory, distribution, and routing decisions in a supply chain. In this work, we focus on production routing in the industrial gas business, where the challenge lies in the simultaneous optimization of complex and power-intensive production plants and highly integrated supply chains with vendor-managed inventory (V...