In any supply chain, distribution planning of products is of great importance to managers. With effective and flexible distribution planning, mangers can increase the efficiency of time, place, and delivery utility of whole supply chain. In this paper, inventory routing problem (IRP) is applied to distribution planning of perishable products in a supply chain. The studied supply chain is compos...

The combination of inventory management and vehicle routing decisions yields a difficult combinatorial optimization problem called the Inventory-Routing Problem (IRP). This problem arises when both types of decisions must be taken jointly, which is the case in vendor-managed inventory systems. The IRP has received significant attention in recent years. Several heuristic and exact algorithms are...

A vehicle routing problem is a significant problem that has attracted great attention from researchers in recent years. The main objectives of the vehicle routing problem are to minimize the traveled distance, total traveling time, number of vehicles and cost function of transportation. Reducing these variables leads to decreasing the total cost and increasing the driver's satisfaction level. O...

Inventory routing problems arise as simultaneous decisions in inventory and routing optimization. In the present study, vendor managed inventory is proposed as a collaborative model for reverse supply chains and the optimization problem is modeled in terms of an inventory routing problem. The studied reverse supply chains include several return generators and recovery centers and one collection...

in this paper, for the first time, blood inventory-routing problem (irp) is defined and a mixed integer linear programming formulation is presented. to do so, the concepts of assigned inventory, transfusion to crossmatch ratio, crossmatch release period, older-first policy and order-up-to level inventory policy along with perishability considerations are incorporated into the latest inventory-r...

One of the important aspects of distribution optimization problems is simultaneously, controlling the inventory while devising the best vehicle routing, which is a famous problem, called inventory-routing problem (IRP). When the lot-sizing decisions are jointed with IRP, the problem will get more complicated called production inventory-routing problem (PIRP). To become closer to the real life p...

Manufacturers, who re-supply a large number of customers, continually struggle with the question of how to formulate a replenishment strategy. The purpose of this paper is to determine the optimal set of routes for a group of vehicles in the transportation network under defined constraints – which is known as the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) – delivering new items, and resolving the invent...

This paper describes a stochastic short sea shipping problem where a company is responsible for both the distribution of oil products between islands and the inventory management of those products at consumption storage tanks located at ports. In general, ship routing and scheduling is associated with uncertainty in weather conditions and unpredictable waiting times at ports. In this work, both...

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...

Vendor managed inventory replenishment is a business practice in which vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished. The inventory routing problem addresses the coordination of inventory management and transportation. The ability to solve the inventory routing problem contributes to the realization of the potential savings in invento...