In this paper, a real-life routing and scheduling problem encountered is addressed. The problem, which consists in optimizing the delivery of fluids by tank trucks on a long-term horizon, is a generalization of the vehicle routing problem with vendor managed inventory replenishment. The particularity of this problem is that the vendor monitors the customers’ inventories, deciding when and how m...

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic models for highly relevant extensions of the classical vehicle routing problem in the context of supply chain management. The classical vehicle routing problem is extended in various ways. We will especially focus on extensions with respect to lotsizing, scheduling, packing, batching, inventory and intermodality. The proposed models allow for a more...

We propose a novel algorithmic framework to solve an integrated planning and scheduling problem in supply chain management. This problem involves the integration of an inventory management problem and the vehicle routing problem with time windows, both of which are known to be NP-hard. Under this framework, algorithms that solve the underlying sub-problems collaborate rigorously yet in a comput...

The article presents a study on a biobjective generalization of the inventory routing problem, an important optimization problem found in logistical networks in which aspects of inventory management and vehicle routing intersect. A compact solution representation and a heuristic optimization approach are presented, and experimental investigations involving novel benchmark instances are carried ...

The inventory slack routing problem is a specialized vehicle routing problem that focuses on delivering waves of inventory to sites in a timely and even manner. It is difficult to find an optimal solution to this problem, thus heuristic and search techniques are necessary. ...

We introduce a unified modeling and solution framework for various classes of rich vehicle and inventory routing problems as well as other probability-based routing problems with a time-horizon dimension. Demand is assumed to be stochastic and non-stationary, and is forecast using any forecasting model that provides expected demands over the planning horizon, with error terms from any empirical...