A computational study for the inventory routing problem

TL;DR

This paper compares various computational methods for solving an inventory routing problem involving a single product, focusing on routing and inventory control, through empirical analysis of different algorithm combinations.

Contribution

It provides a comparative numerical study of exact TSP algorithms and inventory models, highlighting their effectiveness and efficiency in inventory routing.

Findings

Different algorithm combinations vary in cost and solution time

Surveyed approaches include TSP relaxations and mixed integer programming

Empirical results guide method selection for inventory routing

Abstract

In this work we compare several new computational approaches to an inventory routing problem, in which a single product is shipped from a warehouse to retailers via an uncapacitated vehicle. We survey exact algorithms for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and its relaxations in the literature for the routing component. For the inventory control component we survey classical mixed integer linear programming and shortest path formulations for inventory models. We present a numerical study comparing combinations of the two empirically in terms of cost and solution time.