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3186. The Two-Echelon Inventory-Routing Problem: A Matheuristic Approach

Invited abstract in session MA-60: Vehicle routing I, stream Transportation.

Monday, 8:30-10:00
Room: S09 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Sara Charaf
School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology
2. Duygu Tas
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University
3. Simme Douwe Flapper
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
4. Tom van Woensel
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

Abstract

The two-echelon inventory-routing problem (2E-IRP) addresses the coordination of vehicle routing and inventory management throughout a two-echelon supply network. The latter consists of intermediate facilities that are located in the city outskirt, supplied from distant depots, and serve a set of geographically widespread customers. The customers' demand is met from either their local inventory or intermediate facilities' inventory. The aim is to minimize the transportation and inventory costs while meeting customers' demands over a finite discrete planning horizon. We introduce an effective tabu search-based matheuristic approach to solve it.
Computational experiments show that our approach achieves good results regarding solution quality and computational time. For small instances, the matheuristic finds 99 optimal solutions out of 165 known optimal solutions and achieves an average gap of (-2.32%) over 235 instances with a known best upper bound only. Our approach also solves larger instances within a reasonable computational time and provides upper bounds for all 400 large-sized instances for the first time to the literature.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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