In this research work an analytical model has been proposed, for finding new distribution passage from the suppliers to the geographically scattered dealers and to deal with the pricing problem. Since the result for this model is a non-polynomial problem, tabu search that uses various surrounding approaches has been employed to provide gratifying results. Rate fixing and request claiming are ne...

Inventory management and transportation issues are very important problems in distribution companies. Simultaneous l optimization of these problems realizes significant savings for all partners of the supply chain. One of the problems that should be addressed in the scope of simultaneous sl optimization is the inventory routing problem (IRP). IRP deals with how to manage the supply goods from o...

Inventory-routing problems (IRPs) arise in vendor-managed inventory systems. They require jointly solving a vehicle routing problem and an inventory management problem. Whereas the solutions they yield tend to benefit the vendor and customers, solving IRPs solely based on cost considerations may lead to inconveniences to both parties. These are related to the fleet size and vehicle load, to the...

Title of Dissertation: ONLINE INVENTORY REPLENISHMENT AND FLEET ROUTING DECISIONS UNDER REAL-TIME INFORMATION Ricardo Giesen, Ph.D., 2007 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department Logistics managers rely on increasingly sophisticated technologies to track demand and associated inventories, allowing rapid response to meet anticipated d...

We consider a single item Production-Inventory-Routing problem with a single producer/supplier and multiple retailers. Inventory management constraints are considered both at the producer and at the retailers, following a vendor managed inventory approach, where the supplier monitors the inventory at retailers and decides on the replenishment policy for each retailer. We assume a constant produ...

I this paper, we present a solution approach for the inventory-routing problem. The inventory-routing problem is a variation of the vehicle-routing problem that arises in situations where a vendor has the ability to make decisions about the timing and sizing of deliveries, as well as the routing, with the restriction that customers are not allowed to run out of product. We develop a two-phase a...

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 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...

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...