Two types of decisions that directly affect the performance of a distribution system is the vehicle routing and inventory assignment. These problems have been studied separately for many years. The inventory routing problem (IRP) is integration of above mentioned distribution problems. In the other words, IRP assumes each customer maintains a local inventory of a product and consumes a certain ...

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...

This paper introduces the Inventory-Routing Problem with Transshipment (IRPT). This problem arises when vehicle routing and inventory decisions must be made simultaneously, which is typically the case in vendor-managed inventory systems. Heuristics and exact algorithms have already been proposed for the Inventory-Routing Problem (IRP), but these algorithms ignore the possibility of performing t...

Solving the Inventory Location-Routing Problem can been seen as an approach to optimize both a supply chain design and its operations costs. Assumptions consider that vehicles might visit more than one retailer per route and that inventory management decisions are included for a multi-depot, multi-retailer system with storage capacity over a discrete time planning horizon. The problem is to det...