An inventory–routing problem with the objective of travel time minimization

Kunpeng Li, Bin Chen, Appa Iyer Sivakumar and Yong Wu

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 236, issue 3, 936-945

Abstract: In this paper, we consider an inventory–routing problem (IRP) in a large petroleum and petrochemical enterprise group. Compared to many other IRPs, the problem in this paper includes some special aspects due to the operational constraints, such as hours-of-service regulations of the company and the industry. Also, in some cases, it is more important to avoid stock out for any station, rather than purely focusing on transportation cost minimization. The objective is to minimize the maximum of the route travel time, which is not addressed in the literature so far. We present a tabu search algorithm to tackle the problem, which builds in an efficient and effective procedure to improve the search quality in each iteration. Moreover, lower bounds of reasonable sized problems, which are intractable in the formulated mathematical model by existing optimization software, are obtained via Lagrangian relaxation technique. Computational results indicate that the lower bounds are tight and the tabu search is capable of providing near optimal, close-to-lower-bound solutions in a computational time effective manner.

Keywords: Logistics; Distribution; Inventory routing; Tabu search; Lagrangian relaxation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:236:y:2014:i:3:p:936-945

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2013.07.034

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