An improved model for large scale inventory routing problem with useful properties

Jianxiang Li (1) , Feng Chu (2) , Haoxun Chen (2)

1 Department of Automatic Control
2 LOSI - Laboratoire d'Optimisation des Systèmes Industriels

In the previous work, we developed a model for inventory routing problem with split delivery and proposed a hybrid approach based on Lagrangian relaxation to solve the model. Numerical experiments show that the proposed hybrid approach can find a high quality near-optimal solution for the problems with up to 200 customers in a reasonable computation time. In this paper, we further improve and simplify the model by introducing a new parameter - transportation cost that is generated by the vehicle's self-load. We derive some important properties of the optimal solution of the improved model. These properties lay a foundation of the proposed Lagrangian relaxation method. They can be also used as a tool to gauge and improve the quality of solutions.

Keywords: Large-scale systems; Routing; Vehicles; Lagrangian functions; Transportation; Costs; Gas industry; Stochastic processes; Relaxation methods; Feathers; Transportation Logistics; Inventory Routing; Vehicle Routing

Domains: Operations Research [cs.RO]

Jianxiang Li, Feng Chu, Haoxun Chen. An improved model for large scale inventory routing problem with useful properties. 2009 Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC), Jun 2009, Guilin, China. pp.2949-2953, ⟨10.1109/CCDC.2009.5191818⟩. ⟨hal-02490608⟩