Article: Using valid inequalities to solve the integrated production-inventory-distribution-routing problem Journal: International Journal of Operational Research (IJOR) 2019 Vol.35 No.4 pp.551 - 574 Abstract: The production-inventory-distribution-routing problem is an integrated supply chain management problem that combines decisions on several functions. The objective is to minimise the total costs without violating demand fulfilment policy. A production-inventory-distribution-routing problem of medium size is a combinatorial optimisation problem mostly intractable to solve using exact methods. The main contribution of this work is to introduce valid inequalities for a problem with a single plant, multiple products and multiple heterogeneous vehicles to improve the quality of lower bounds, obtain a good approximation of the convex hull of the polyhedron of the problem and reduce its hypervolume, so that the computation time can be reduced without a significant effect on the quality of the solutions found. The results showed that adding the valid inequalities to the model can improve the percentage gaps for all the tested instances with a significant improvement in the lower bounds from the poor bounds obtained from the linear programming relaxation (up to 98.8% for the dataset of 50 customers and up to 79.7% for the dataset of 100 customers). Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

Title: Using valid inequalities to solve the integrated production-inventory-distribution-routing problem

Authors: Noha Mostafa; Amr Eltawil

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, New Borg Elarab, Alexandria 21534, Egypt ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, New Borg Elarab, Alexandria 21534, Egypt

Abstract: The production-inventory-distribution-routing problem is an integrated supply chain management problem that combines decisions on several functions. The objective is to minimise the total costs without violating demand fulfilment policy. A production-inventory-distribution-routing problem of medium size is a combinatorial optimisation problem mostly intractable to solve using exact methods. The main contribution of this work is to introduce valid inequalities for a problem with a single plant, multiple products and multiple heterogeneous vehicles to improve the quality of lower bounds, obtain a good approximation of the convex hull of the polyhedron of the problem and reduce its hypervolume, so that the computation time can be reduced without a significant effect on the quality of the solutions found. The results showed that adding the valid inequalities to the model can improve the percentage gaps for all the tested instances with a significant improvement in the lower bounds from the poor bounds obtained from the linear programming relaxation (up to 98.8% for the dataset of 50 customers and up to 79.7% for the dataset of 100 customers).

Keywords: production-inventory-distribution-routing problem; PIDRP; vehicle routing; lower bounds; valid inequalities; supply chain management; SCM; lot sizing; inventory management; distribution.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2019.101460

International Journal of Operational Research, 2019 Vol.35 No.4, pp.551 - 574

Received: 23 Jun 2016
Accepted: 07 Oct 2016
Published online: 11 Aug 2019 *

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Title: Using valid inequalities to solve the integrated production-inventory-distribution-routing problem

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