A Two-Phase Iterative Heuristic Approach for the Production Routing Problem

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 capacitated lot-sizing problem is defined for optimizing production decisions and inventory management. T...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTransportation science Vol. 49; no. 4; pp. 784 - 795
Main Authors Absi, N., Archetti, C., Dauzère-Pérès, S., Feillet, D.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore INFORMS 01.11.2015
Transportation Science & Logistic Society of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Subjects
Analysis
Computer Science
Decision making
Decisions
distribution
Heuristic
Heuristic methods
Heuristic programming
heuristics
Inventory management
Iterative methods
Lot sizing
Management science
Methods
Operations Research
Optimization
production
Retail industry
Route planning
Routing
Technology application
Traveling salesman problem
Vehicle routing
Vehicles
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Summary: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 capacitated 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 routing problem depending on the number of vehicles. A two-phase iterative method, from which several heuristics are derived, is proposed that iteratively focuses on lot-sizing and distribution decisions. Computational results show that our best heuristic outperforms existing methods.
ISSN:0041-1655
1526-5447
DOI:10.1287/trsc.2014.0523