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An integrated inventory-routing system for multi-item joint replenishment with limited vehicle capacity. (English) Zbl 1098.90005

Summary: In this paper, we develop a mathematical programming approach for coordinating inventory and transportation decisions in an inbound commodity collection system. In particular, we consider a system that consists of a set of geographically dispersed suppliers that manufacture one or more non-identical items, and a central warehouse that stocks these items. The warehouse faces a constant and deterministic demand for the items from outside retailers. The items are collected by a fleet of vehicles that are dispatched from the central warehouse. The vehicles are capacitated, and must also satisfy a frequency constraint. Adopting a policy in which each vehicle always collects the same set of items, we formulate the inventory-routing problem of minimizing the long-run average inventory and transportation costs as a set partitioning problem. We employ a column generation approach to determine a lower bound on the total costs, and develop a branch-and-price algorithm that finds the optimal assignment of items to vehicles. We also propose greedy constructive heuristics, and develop a very large-scale neighborhood (VLSN) search algorithm to find near-optimal solutions for the problem. Computational tests are performed on a set of randomly generated problem instances.

MSC:

90B05 Inventory, storage, reservoirs
60K25 Queueing theory (aspects of probability theory)
60K30 Applications of queueing theory (congestion, allocation, storage, traffic, etc.)
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