This work is motivated by the need to solve the inventory routing problem when implementing a business practice called vendor managed inventory replenishment (VMI). With VMI, vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished at each customer. The inventory routing problem attempts to coordinate inventory replenishment and transportation i...

Abstract In the Inventory Routing Problem, customer demand is satisfied from inventory which replenished with capacitated vehicles. The objective to minimize total routing and holding cost over a time horizon. If customers are located relatively close each other, one has opportunity satisfy of by stored at another nearby customer. optimization replenishments, this option can be included lower c...

The production routing problem (PRP) considers the coordination of production, inventory, distribution, and routing decisions in a supply chain. In this work, we focus on production routing in the industrial gas business, where the challenge lies in the simultaneous optimization of complex and power-intensive production plants and highly integrated supply chains with vendor-managed inventory (V...

This paper investigates the integrated optimization of production, distribution and inventory decisions related to supplying multiple retailers from a central production facility. A single-item uncapacitated lot-sizing problem is defined for optimizing production decisions and inventory management. The optimization of daily distribution is modeled as a traveling salesman problem or a vehicle ro...

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been transformed to liquid form for the purpose of transportation, which is mainly done by specially built LNG vessels travelling from the production site to the consumers. We describe a real-life ship routing and scheduling problem from the LNG business, with both inventory and berth capacity constraints at the liquefaction port. We propose a...

The incorporation of reverse logistics into production routing problems can promote and coordinate the implementation of sustainable development for supply chains. This study aims to incorporate reverse logistics into production routing problems and investigate the reduction of carbon emissions under carbon cap-and-trade. Mixed-integer programming models are proposed for the production routing ...

We present a real planning problem where cement is transported by a fleet of ships from several production factories to many consumption silos along the Norwegian coast. The planners are responsible for both the ship routing and the inventory management at all production and consumption facilities. There exist several types of cement and the various types have to be allocated in separate cargo ...