Interactive Approach to the Inventory Routing Problem: Computational Speedup Through Focused Search

We study an interactive-approach to the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) with the goal of supporting the decision maker (DM). Combining the supply chain management aspects ‘inventory management’ and ‘transportation’ into a simultaneous model can lead to beneficial cost reductions for both the supplier and the customer. A preference model, namely the reference point, is introduced to elicit individual preference information of the experts. Then, a subsequent interactive-approach is developed to solve the dynamic IRP. The comparison of the interactive-approach with an a posteriori-approach shows the applicability and the achieved speedup of the focused search. We also consider an extended interactive-approach for the benchmark test instances that is meaningful in terms of including a reservation point as a ‘natural’ convergence criterion.

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