A robust heuristic algorithm for multiple-customers coordinated scheduling of delivery and inventory problem

In this work, we tackle problem of integrated delivery-inventory for the supply of multi items to more than one customer, after its production by a manufacturer to minimize the total delivery and storage costs. A mathematical model incorporating the costs of both the delivery and the storage costs is developed as a Mixed Integer Programming model (MIP). The proposed approach is an heuristic algorithm where in the first phase, a heuristic search is deployed to construct a sequence of batches and in the second the batches are scheduled accord to the due dates of the jobs. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm in terms of time of resolution and solution quality. The evaluation is carried out against the solutions generated by the exact mathematical model of the problem. Experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed heuristic algorithm is robust in term of time of resolution and generates feasible solutions for the instances where the MIP model cannot. (C) 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.