Stochastic Inventory Routing: Route Design with Stockouts and Route Failures

Pierre Trudeau and Moshe Dror
Additional contact information
Pierre Trudeau: ADOPT, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Moshe Dror: Decisions Sciences, College of Business, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721 and CRT, Universite de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Transportation Science, 1992, vol. 26, issue 3, 171-184

Abstract: The stochastic inventory routing problem involves the distribution of a commodity such as heating oil over a long period of time to a large set of customers. The customers maintain a local inventory of the commodity which they consume at a daily rate. Their consumption varies daily and seasonally and their exact demand is known only upon the arrival of the delivery vehicle. This paper presentes a detailed analysis of this problem incorporating the stochastic nature of customers' consumptions and the possibility of route failures when the actual demand on a route exceeds the capacity of a vehicle. A number of solution procedures are compared on a large set of real life data for a period of 12 consecutive weeks. The winning strategy, though computationally more expensive, provides the best system performance and reduces (almost eliminates) the stockout phenomena.

Date: 1992
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.26.3.171 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:26:y:1992:i:3:p:171-184

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().