Single-Period Cutting Planes for Inventory Routing Problems

Pasquale Avella (), Maurizio Boccia () and Laurence A. Wolsey ()
Additional contact information
Pasquale Avella: Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università del Sannio, 82100 Benevento, Italy
Maurizio Boccia: Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università del Sannio, 82100 Benevento, Italy
Laurence A. Wolsey: Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Université catholique de Louvain, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Transportation Science, 2018, vol. 52, issue 3, 497-508

Abstract: The Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) involves the distribution of one or more products from a supplier to a set of clients over a discrete planning horizon. Each client has a known demand to be met in each period and can only hold a limited amount of stock. The product is shipped through a distribution network by one or more vehicles of limited capacity. The objective is to find replenishment decisions minimizing the sum of the storage and distribution costs. In this paper, we present IRP reformulations under the Maximum Level replenishment policy, derived from a single-period substructure. We define a generic family of valid inequalities, and then introduce two specific subclasses for which the separation problem of generating violated inequalities can be effectively solved. A basic Branch-and-Cut algorithm has been implemented to demonstrate the strength of the single-period reformulations. We present computational results for the benchmark instances with 50 clients and 3 periods and 30 clients and 6 periods.

Keywords: inventory routing; valid inequalities; cutting planes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2016.0729 (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:52:y:2018:i:3:p:497-508

Access Statistics for this article

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