Mathematical modeling for inventory-routing problem in a transshipment system with time window

Logistics is a science widely recognized as a value-added component for organizations and their products and services as it optimizes the use of resources, minimizes costs and maximizes level of service by coordinating activities such as transportation, inventory management and material handling. This paper introduces a multi-period, multi-product Inventory-Routing Problem with planned Transshipment (IRPT) and time window. The novelty with regard to existing approaches is that transshipment movements are performed by the same vehicles that are distributing from the factory, meaning that they are subjected to the same capacity, time and cost restrictions. We present an exact formulation for theproblem. The proposed model belongs to the mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) one. Finally, a number of small-sized problems are generated and solved by the GAMS commercial software in order to show the efficiency of the proposed model

Keywords:

Inventory-routing problem , transshipment , time window