This paper studies the cyclic inventory routing problem with stochastic demand. A geographically dispersed set of retailers demand rates is replenished from a single depot using vehicles limited capacity. For an infinite horizon, fixed-partition policy adopted that partitions into subsets are always together in same route being cyclically repeated. The objective to provide cost efficient buffer...

We consider an inventory routing problem in discrete time where a supplier has to serve a set of customers over a time horizon. A capacity constraint for the inventory is given for each customer and the service cannot cause any stock-out situation. Two different replenishment policies are considered, the order-up-to level and the maximum level policies. A single vehicle with a given capacity is...

When inventory management, distribution and routing decisions are determined simultaneously, implementing a vendor-managed inventory strategy, a difficult combinatorial optimization problem must be solved to determine which customers to visit, how much to replenish, and how to route the vehicles around them. This is known as the inventory-routing problem. We analyze a distribution system with o...

This paper describes a stochastic short sea shipping problem where a company is responsible for both the distribution of oil products between islands and the inventory management of those products at consumption storage tanks located at ports. In general, ship routing and scheduling is associated with uncertainty in weather conditions and unpredictable waiting times at ports. In this work, both...

We present a real planning problem where cement is transported by a fleet of ships from several production factories to many consumption silos along the Norwegian coast. The planners are responsible for both the ship routing and the inventory management at all production and consumption facilities. There exist several types of cement and the various types have to be allocated in separate cargo ...

The typical inventory routing problem deals with the repeated distribution of a single product from a single facility with an unlimited supply to a set of customers that can all be reached with out-and-back trips. Unfortunately, this is not always the reality. We focus on the inventory routing problem with continuous moves, which incorporates two important real-life complexities: limited produc...

We study an inventory-routing problem in which multiperiod inventory holding, backlogging, and vehicle routing decisions are to be taken for a set of customers who receive units of a single item from a depot with infinite supply. We consider a case in which the demand at each customer is deterministic and relatively small compared to the vehicle capacity, and the customers are located closely s...

We consider a new approach to stochastic inventory/routing that approximates the future costs of current actions using optimal dual prices of a linear program. We obtain two such linear programs by formulating the control problem as a Markov decision process and then replacing the optimal value function with the sum of single-customer inventory value functions. The resulting approximation yield...

negative impact of delays on customer service level by keeping redundant inventory or safety stock. Although safety stock protects companies from disruptions or delays, this comes at a cost because higher inventory levels tie up working capital and increase inventory management costs, such as warehousing and damage rates. In addition, the higher inventory level increases the risks associated wi...