STRATEGY OF SOLUTION FOR THE INVENTORY ROUTING PROBLEM BASED ON SEPARABLE CROSS DECOMPOSITION

Abstract

The Inventory-Routing Problem (IRP) involves a central warehouse, a fleet of trucks wlth finlte capacity, a set of customers, and a known storage capacity. The objective is to determine when to serve each customer, as well as what route each truck should take, with the lowest expense. IRP is a NP-hard problem, this means that searching for solutions can take a very long time. A three-phase strategy is used to solve the problem. This strategy is constructedn by answering the key questions: Which customers should be attended in a planned period? What volume of n products should be delivered to each customer? And, which route should be followed by each truck? The second phase uses Cross Separable Decomposition to solve an Allocation Problem, in order to answer questions two and three, solving a location problem. The result is a very efficient ranking algorithm O(n3) for large cases of the lRP.