EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1397. Multi Product Inventory Routing in Hospitality Deliveries

Invited abstract in session TB-58: Inventory Routing, stream Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Tuesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Liberty 1.13

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Lukas Seeholzer
Industrial Management, KU Leuven
2. Pieter Vansteenwegen
Institute for Mobility - CIB, KU Leuven

Abstract

The multi product inventory routing problem with pickup and delivery is based on a case study in the hospitality industry. Multiple suppliers need to deliver their products to multiple customers over several time periods. Optimization opportunities arise when cooperations between the stakeholders enable the consolidation of deliveries to reduce the total number of delivery routes, km travelled, and vehicles used. Simultaneous inventory management at the customers offer additional room for optimization in the time dimension.
A mathematical model is presented as well as experiments showing its limitations even on very small instances. For more practical applications, a variable neighborhood search is presented. The option to combine deliveries both over different vehicles as well as over time makes this an inherently challenging problem and asks for smart local search moves that take advantage of the problem structure. Preliminary experiments show promising results for instances of realistic sizes.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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