Abstract
This paper presents a two-echelon inventory-routing problem for perishable products. Products are delivered from a supplier to an intermediary depot, where storage may occur and from which they are delivered by smaller vehicles to the customer locations. Holding costs are incurred for storage at the depot. Customer availability is taken into account in the form of customer delivery patterns. The objective is to minimise the total transportation and holding costs. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear program and solve it by means of an adaptive large neighbourhood search metaheuristic in combination with the solution of a reduced formulation. Three variants of the heuristic are compared on a variety of randomly generated instances. Given the two-stage structure of the problem, computational results show the importance of taking the cost structure into account when choosing the most suitable solution approach.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 156-172 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Computers & Operations Research |
| Volume | 107 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2019 |
Funding
This research was partially funded by The Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research ( NWO ), as part of the Greendish project ( ALWGroen.2014.017 ), by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under Grant 2015–06189 and by the WASS junior researcher grant of Wageningen University . This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments. Appendix A
Keywords
- Adaptive large neighbourhood search
- Inventory-routing
- Last-mile logistics
- Perishable products
- Two-echelon system