A Benders Decomposition Approach for the Multivehicle Production Routing Problem with Order-up-to-Level Policy

Zhenzhen Zhang (), Zhixing Luo (), Roberto Baldacci () and Andrew Lim ()
Additional contact information
Zhenzhen Zhang: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China;
Zhixing Luo: School of Management and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, People’s Republic of China;
Roberto Baldacci: Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi,” University of Bologna, Cesena 47521, Italy;
Andrew Lim: Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077

Transportation Science, 2021, vol. 55, issue 1, 160-178

Abstract: The production routing problem (PRP) arises in the applications of integrated supply chain which jointly optimize the production, inventory, distribution, and routing decisions. The literature on this problem is quite rare due to its complexity. In this paper, we consider the multivehicle PRP (MVPRP) with order-up-to-level inventory replenishment policy, where every time a customer is visited, the quantity delivered is such that the maximum inventory level is reached. We propose an exact Benders’ decomposition approach to solve the MVPRP, which decomposes the problem as a master problem and a slave problem. The master problem decides whether to produce the product, the quantity to be produced, and the customers to be replenished for every period of the planning horizon. The resulting slave problem decomposes into a capacitated vehicle routing problem for each period of the planning horizon where each problem is solved using an exact algorithm based on the set partitioning model, and the identified feasibility and optimality cuts are added to the master problem to guide the solution process. Valid inequalities and initial optimality cuts are used to strengthen the linear programming relaxation of the master formulation. The exact method is tested on MVPRP instances and on instances of the multivehicle vendor-managed inventory routing problem, a special case of the MVPRP, and the good performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated.

Keywords: production routing problem; logic Benders’ decomposition; set partitioning model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2019.0964 (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:55:y:2021:i:1:p:160-178

Access Statistics for this article

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