Variable neighborhood search for the inventory routing and scheduling problem in a supply chain

The inventory, routing and scheduling decisions are three major driving factors for supply chain performance. Since they are related to one another in a supply chain, they should be determined simultaneously to improve the decision quality. In the past, the inventory policy, vehicle routing and vehicle scheduling are determined sequentially and separately. Hence, the total cost (inventory, routing and vehicle costs) would increase. In this paper, an integrated model for the inventory routing and scheduling problem (IRSP) is proposed. Since searching for the optimal solution for this model is a non-polynomial (NP) problem, a metaheuristic, variable neighborhood search (VNS), is proposed. The proposed method was compared with other existing methods. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is better than other methods in terms of average cost per day.