Vehicle routing in a city logistics context. (R-11725)

In this project, we will address an integrated logistics solution by optimizing the vehicle routing and inventory management decision simultaneously. This problem refers to the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP). We focus on the IRP in a city logistics setting and develop solution methods to heuristically solve the problems. The literature review shows that while the IRP has been studied extensively, only a few research on IRP pays attention to important characteristics that occur in urban transportation, such as time windows, multiple vehicle trips, the use of heterogeneous vehicles, and so on. Hence, one promising research direction is the study of IRP that includes more realistic features that appear in urban transportation. In addition, only a few studies consider the integration of inventory and routing decisions along with collaboration aspects in a city logistics context. Therefore, we investigate the impact of integrated inventory routing decisions and collaborative mechanisms in a city logistics context.

Keywords:Distribution logistics, Operations research

Disciplines:Operations research and mathematical programming, Business economics, Logistics and supply chain management, Mathematical methods, programming models, mathematical and simulation modelling