Maritime inventory routing with multiple products: A case study from the cement industry

This paper considers a maritime inventory routing problem faced by a major cement producer. A heterogeneous fleet of bulk ships transport multiple non-mixable cement products from producing factories to regional silo stations along the coast of Norway. Inventory constraints are present both at the factories and the silos, and there are upper and lower limits for all inventories. The ship fleet capacity is limited, and in peak periods the demand for cement products at the silos exceeds the fleet capacity. In addition, constraints regarding the capacity of the ships’ cargo holds, the depth of the ports and the fact that different cement products cannot be mixed must be taken into consideration. A construction heuristic embedded in a genetic algorithmic framework is developed. The approach adopted is used to solve real instances of the problem within reasonable solution time and with good quality solutions.