New models and algorithms for the cyclic inventory routing problem

Abstract

This is a summary of the author’s PhD thesis supervised by El-Houssaine Aghezzaf and defended on 4 December 2006 at the Universiteit Gent. The thesis is written in English and is electronically available from http://ir18.ugent.be/birger.raa/. This work studies the problem of finding optimal three-way cost trade-offs between vehicle fleet costs, distribution costs and holding costs in the cyclic replenishment of a set of customers with constant demand rates from a single depot

Route and fleet design for cyclic inventory routing

“…In that method, route frequencies for all routes made by the same vehicle are always optimized together, using relative frequencies. As mentioned above, Raa and Aghezzaf [14] only report solutions for 80 of the 320 instances, but the full results are available in Raa [11]. For our experiments here, we also created a new implementation that is computationally more efficient and in which absolute instead of relative route frequencies are used within the distribution patterns.…”

“…Results for the 80 instances with large vehicle capacity and large service area are reported in Raa and Aghezzaf [14], but results for the other 240 instances are available in Raa [11]. Chitsaz et al [7] also report results for all 320 instances.…”

“…The set of benchmark problems was introduced by Raa [11] in a 10 × 2 5 full factorial design with five factors that each have two possible levels and ten instances per factor combination, resulting in a total of 320 instances. The characteristics of the instances are as follows [11].…”

A two-phase algorithm for the cyclic inventory routing problem

“…Archetti et al (2007) and Archetti et al (2012)) and cannot be used as benchmark instances for the CIRP. The only available benchmark instances of the CIRP are published by Raa (2006). In Raa (2006), 320 benchmark instances are presented for CIRP.…”

“…He studied a cyclic IRP for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection that planned a barge fleet acquisition. Raa (2006) solved a cyclic IRP for a paper goods distributor in the Benelux region (Europe) to set up long-term cyclic replenishment schemes from its single warehouse to a set of customers with stable consumption rates. Another example of the application of the long-term IRPs is in the ship fleet sizing for a liner shipping company with fixed long-term cargo contracts (Christiansen et al 2007).…”