We consider an application of the inventory routing problem. A fleet of vehicles is devoted to collecting a single product from geographically dispersed sites. Each site has its own accumulation rate and stock capacity. On each visit, the vehicle empties the stock. At the tactical level, the objective is to minimize the fleet size and an estimate of the distance travelled. Moreover, for practic...

We analyze three queueing control problems that model a dynamic stochastic distribution system, where a single capacitated vehicle serves a finite number of retailers in a make-to-stock fashion. The objective in each of these vehicle routing and inventory problems is to minimize the long run average inventory (holding and backordering) and transportation cost. In all three problems, the control...

We solve a rich logistical problem inspired from practice, in which a heterogeneous xed eet of vehicles is used for collecting recyclable waste from large containers over a nite planning horizon. Each container is equipped with a sensor, which communicates its level at the start of the day. Given a history of observations, a forecasting model is used to estimate the point demand forecasts as we...

We consider an inventory routing problem in discrete time where a supplier has to serve a set of customers over a time horizon. A capacity constraint for the inventory is given for each customer and the service cannot cause any stock-out situation. Two different replenishment policies are considered, the order-up-to level and the maximum level policies. A single vehicle with a given capacity is...

We consider the situation where parts from suppliers have to be picked up by a capacitated vehicle for an assembly plant that faces stochastic demand. We propose a twophase heuristic to calculate “good” base stock policies for the stochastic inbound inventory routing problem. In this paper, we calculate multiple performance measures for the results obtained from the analytical model. The result...

Many logistic activities are concerned with linking material flows among companies and processes. In such applications, we find a combination of quantity decisions, e. g. the amount of goods shipped (Inventory Management), and routing decisions as tackled in the area of Vehicle Routing. Clearly, both areas intersect to a considerable degree, complicating the solution of such problems. Recently,...

We study an inventory-routing problem in which multiperiod inventory holding, backlogging, and vehicle routing decisions are to be taken for a set of customers who receive units of a single item from a depot with infinite supply. We consider a case in which the demand at each customer is deterministic and relatively small compared to the vehicle capacity, and the customers are located closely s...

In this paper, we present a problem in international shipping which combines the ship routing problem with inventory considerations. A fleet of ships is responsible for the transportation of a given commodity between a supply port and the demand ports. Their routes should be selected so that the total transportation cost and the inventory cost is minimized. Although a generic mixedinteger progr...

The inventory routing problem presented in this study is a one-to-many distribution network consisting of a manufacturer that produces multi products to be transported to many geographically dispersed customers. We consider a finite horizon where a fleet of capacitated homogeneous vehicles, housed at a depot/warehouse, transports products from the warehouse to meet the demand specified by the c...

In the south-east region of France, the disposal of medical waste accumulated by patients in self treatment, is commonly organized as follows. At pharmacies, patients receive empty boxes which are dedicated to the safe storage of their medical waste. Full boxes are brought back by the patients to any of the pharmacies, where they are stored. When a certain limit on the number of boxes at a phar...