A modified ant colony optimization to solve multi products inventory routing problem

Abstract

This study considers a one-to-many inventory routing problem (IRP) network consisting of a manufacturer that produces multi products to be transported to many geographically dispersed customers. We consider a finite horizon where a fleet of capacitated homogeneous vehicles, housed at a depot/warehouse, transport products from the warehouse to meet the demand specified by the customers in each period. The demand for each product is deterministic and time varying and each customer requests a distinct product. The inventory holding cost is product specific and is incurred at the customer sites. The objective is to determine the amount on inventory and to construct a delivery schedule that minimizes both the total transportation and inventory holding costs while ensuring each customer's demand is met over the planning horizon. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem and is solved using CPLEX 12.4 to get the lower and upper bound (best integer solution) for each problem considered. We propose a modified ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve the problem and the built route is improved by using local search. ACO performs better on large instances compared to the upper bound. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.