This paper is a computational study to investigate the value of coordinating production and distribution planning. The particular scenario we consider concerns a plant that produces a number of products over time and maintains an inventory of finished goods at the plant. The products are distributed by a fleet of trucks to a number of retail outlets at which the demand for each product is known...

Multi-echelon distribution networks are quite common in supply chain and logistics. Deliveries of multiple items from factories to customers aremanagedby routing and consolidating shipments inwarehouses carrying on long-term inventories. On the other hand, cross-docking is a logistics technique that differs from warehousing because products are no longer stored at intermediate depots. Instead, ...

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 introduce the inventory routing problem with continuous moves to study two important real-life complexities: limited product availabi...

abstractaccidents and natural disasters and crises coming out of them indicate the importance of an integrated planning to reduce their effected. therefore, disaster relief logistics is one of the main activities in disaster management. in this paper, we study the response phase of the disaster management cycle and a bi-objective model has been developed for relief chain logistic in uncertainty...

Given the rapid advances in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, and increasing need to monitor at a city level, one of the current research gaps is how to systematically deploy drones over multiple periods. We propose a real-time data-driven approach: we formulate the first deterministic arc-inventory routing problem and derive its stochastic dynamic policy. The policy is expected to be of gre...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is addressed to a class of problems for determining a set of vehicle routes, in which each vehicle departs from a given depot, serves a given set of customers, and returns back to the same depot. On the other hand, simultaneous delivery and pickup problems have drawn much attention in the past few years due to its high usage in real world cases. This study, therefo...

Distribution network design (DND) attempts to integrate tactical issues such as inventory policies and/or vehicle routing decisions with strategic ones such as the problem of locating facilities and allocate customers to such facilities. When inventory policy decision making is considered the problem is also known as inventory location modelling (ILM) problem. During the last two decades, mathe...

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 present a time decomposition for inventory routing problems. The methodology is based on valuing inventory with a concave piecewise linear function and then combining solutions to single-period subproblems using dynamic programming techniques. Computational experiments show that the resulting value function accurately captures the inventory’s value, and solving the multi-period problem as a ...

The single-vehicle cyclic inventory routing problem (SV-CIRP) is concerned with a repeated distribution of a product from a single depot to a selected subset of retailers having stable demands. The objective is to determine the subset of retailers to cyclically replenish, the quantities to be delivered to each, and to design the vehicle routes so that the expected total distribution and invento...