Formulations for an inventory routing problem |
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Authors: | Claudia Archetti Nicola Bianchessi Stefan Irnich M. Grazia Speranza |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Economics and Management, University of Brescia, , Brescia, Italy;2. Chair of Logistics Management, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, , Mainz, Germany |
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Abstract: | In this paper, we present and compare formulations for the inventory routing problem (IRP) where the demand of customers has to be served, over a discrete time horizon, by capacitated vehicles starting and ending their routes at a depot. The objective of the IRP is the minimization of the sum of inventory and transportation costs. The formulations include known and new mathematical programming formulations. Valid inequalities are also presented. The formulations are tested on a large set of benchmark instances. One of the most significant conclusions is that the formulations that use vehicle‐indexed variables are superior to the more compact, aggregate formulations. |
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Keywords: | routing problems integer programming branch‐and‐cut algorithm supply chain management |
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