Title: Solving the joint production distribution problem by the variable neighbourhood search algorithm

Authors: Nejah Ben Mabrouk; Bassem Jarboui; Mansour Eddaly

Addresses: Department of Management Information Systems and Producion Management, College of Business and Economics, Qassim University, P.O. Box 6640, Buraidah, 51452, Qassim, Saudi Arabia; ISGI, Université de Sfax, Tunisia ' Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE; IHEC, Université de Sfax, Tunisia ' Department of Management Information Systems and Producion Management, College of Business and Economics, Qassim University, P.O. Box 6640, Buraidah, 51452, Qassim, Saudi Arabia; ISAEG, Université de Gafsa, Tunisia

Abstract: This paper addressed the dynamic integrated production routing problem where the objective is to minimise the total cost including production, inventory and distribution. Since this problem is NP-hard, we developed a variable neighbourhood search algorithm (VNS) to solve it. Therefore, two VNS algorithms were proposed: the first one is used to determine the produced quantity of each day and the second aims to determine the routing map. Insert and swap moves were used in the local search step. The obtained results showed the effectiveness of our proposed approach according to previous works, including greedy heuristic and memetic algorithm, in the literature.

Keywords: production planning; vehicle routing; inventory; variable neighbourhood search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2021.114202

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2021 Vol.18 No.4, pp.484 - 502

Received: 14 Oct 2019
Accepted: 31 Dec 2019
Published online: 13 Apr 2021 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article