Study on integrated inventory-routing problems

A new method was proposed for solving the multi-depot inventory-routing problems with stochastic demands. Firstly a model was established that incorporates working inventory cost, safety stock cost and stochastic routing cost. Secondly, due to the bad convergence while utilizing traditional decomposition and coordination method (DCM) to attack the problems, the coordination values were designed by genetic algorithm (GA). Moreover, an effective tabu search (TS) was designed to cope with the expected routing costs by Monte-Carlo sampling. Finally, simulation results prove the validity of the proposed method.