EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Integrated districting, fleet composition, and inventory planning for a multi-retailer distribution system

Dinçer Konur () and Joseph Geunes
Additional contact information
Dinçer Konur: Missouri University of Science and Technology
Joseph Geunes: University of Arkansas

Annals of Operations Research, 2019, vol. 273, issue 1, No 19, 527-559

Abstract: Abstract We study an integrated districting, fleet composition, and inventory planning problem for a multi-retailer distribution system. In particular, we analyze the districting decisions for a set of retailers such that the retailers within the same district share truck capacity for their shipment requirements. The number of trucks of each type dedicated to a retailer district and retailer inventory planning decisions are jointly determined in a district formation problem. We provide a mixed-integer-nonlinear programming formulation for this problem and develop a column generation based heuristic approach for its set partitioning formulation. To do so, we first characterize important properties of the optimal fleet composition and inventory planning decisions for a given retailer district. Then, we utilize these properties within a branch-and-price method to solve the integrated districting, fleet composition, and inventory planning problem. A set of numerical studies demonstrates the efficiency of the solution methods discussed for the investigated subproblems. An additional set of numerical studies compares the branch-and-price method to a commercial solver and an evolutionary heuristic method. Further numerical studies illustrate the economic as well as environmental benefits of the integrated modeling approach for various settings.

Keywords: Districting; Fleet composition; Inventory management; Distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-016-2338-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:annopr:v:273:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10479-016-2338-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-016-2338-6

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:273:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10479-016-2338-6