Production and Inventory Routing Problems

In this talk we will address two problems dealing with the integration of vehicle routing and inventory management and/or production planning.

The first part of the talk addresses a stochastic inventory routing problem that models a real-world situation [1]. The goal is to collect infectious medical wastes at pharmacists. To optimize the planning process for a predefined time horizon, we take advantage of radio frequency identification technology, which allows an improvement of the planning process for pharmacists as well as local authorities. We develop two solution approaches to optimize the determination of visit dates and corresponding vehicle routes.

The second part of the talk is dedicated to an iterative two-phase method to solve the production routing problems [2]. A single-item capacitated lot-sizing problem is defined for optimizing production decisions and inventory management. The optimization of daily distribution is modelled as a traveling salesman problem or a vehicle routing problem depending on the number of vehicles. A two-phase iterative method, from which several heuristics are derived, is proposed that iteratively focuses on lot-sizing and distribution decisions.

Computational results show that our best heuristic outperforms all existing methods.

1. P. Nolz, N. Absi, D. Feillet, A stochastic inventory routing problem for infectious medical waste collection, In Networks, vol. 63, n°1, pp. 82--95, 2014.
2. N. Absi, C. Archetti, S. Dauzère-Pérès, D. Feillet, An iterative two-phase heuristic approach for the Production Routing Problem, Transportation Science, pp. 1--25, 2014, (To appear).

• Registration to Remy Spliet, spliet@ese.eur.nl is required for availability of lunch.

This event is organised by the Econometric Institute.
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