Nowadays, organizations have to compete with different competitors in regional, national and international levels, so they have to improve their competition capabilities to survive against competitors. Undertaking activities on a global scale requires a proper distribution system which could take advantages of different transportation modes. Accordingly, the present paper addresses a location-r...

In this article we propose, for any > 0, a 2(1+ )-approximation algorithm for a facility location problem with stochastic demands. At open facilities, inventory is kept such that arriving requests find a zero inventory with (at most) some pre-specified probability. The incurred costs are the expected transportation costs from the demand points to the facilities, the operating costs of the facil...

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...

The inventory slack routing problem is a specialized vehicle routing problem that focuses on delivering waves of inventory to sites in a timely and even manner. It is difficult to find an optimal solution to this problem, thus heuristic and search techniques are necessary. ...

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...

In this talk, we consider a location-routing problem in designing the optical Internet with WDM systems. This problem arises from the design of broadband local access networks that deliver high-speed access service to residential subscribers. In this problem, we consider fiber routing and gateway location. For routing problem, we determine the optimal dimensioning of link capacity, and seek to ...