Context: Approaches to logistics solutions through mathematical optimization are widely studied in the literature given their importance for business operations and their computational complexity. In this way, studying the uncertainty associated to operations is a key factor in modeling and decision-making.
Method: A stochastic mathematical model is proposed for the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP), considering scenarios with variation in the demands. To obtain a suitable approach, a p-robustness approach and the reformulation of the classical IRP are presented.
Results: The performed experiments show the benefits of including uncertainty through a p-robust approach when they are analyzed within an instance of the IRP. Moreover, given the selected modeling, the benefits of combining the approaches can be analyzed.
Conclusions: The development of stochastic approaches for decision-making applied to the IRP allow analysts to handle uncertainty and also reduce the complexity of decision when combining different types of problems (Routing + Inventory) in the same model.
Context: This paper presents a MATLAB code implementation and the GUI (General User Interface) for fuzzy random variable generation. Based on previous theoretical results and applications, a MATLAB toolbox has been developed and tested for selected membership functions.
Method: A two–step methodology was used: i) a MATLAB toolbox was implemented to be used as interface and ii) all .m functions are available to be used as normal code. The main goal is to provide graphical and code–efficient tools to users.
Results: The main obtained results are the MATLAB GUI and code. In addition, some experiments were ran to evaluate its capabilities and some randomness statistical tests were successfully performed.
Conclusions: Satisfactory results were obtained from the implementation of the MATLAB code/toolbox. All randomness tests were accepted and all performed experiments shown stability of the toolbox even for large samples (>10.000). Also, the code/toolbox are available online.
Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank to the Prof. M Sc. Miguel Melgarejo and Prof. Jos´e Jairo Soriano–Mendez sincerely for their interest and invaluable support, and a special gratefulness is given to all members of LAMIC.
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