Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio

The inventory routing problem (IRP) is a hard combinatorial optimization problem, where a supplier is responsible for maintaining the inventory levels of customers to keep them from running out of product, while maintaining low overall delivery costs. The IRP involves routing and scheduling decision...

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Main Author: Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah
Format: Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Language:English
Published: 2016
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39170/
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author Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah
author_facet Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah
author_sort Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description The inventory routing problem (IRP) is a hard combinatorial optimization problem, where a supplier is responsible for maintaining the inventory levels of customers to keep them from running out of product, while maintaining low overall delivery costs. The IRP involves routing and scheduling decisions, and the search space grows exponentially with problem size. Although most of the IRP literature focuses on the objective of minimizing delivery costs over a planning horizon, the logistic ratio (delivery cost per unit of product) has been identified in some studies on real-life companies as a potentially better measure of cost efficiency. This study compares the long term cost difference between optimizing cost and optimizing the logistic ratio by running a series of computational experiments. From the results, it emerges that although optimizing the logistic ratio is indeed beneficial in many cases, optimizing cost may be better in the long term for some problem instances, particularly those with short planning horizons
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format Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
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institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
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language English
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publishDate 2016
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spelling nottingham-391702017-10-19T17:35:58Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39170/ Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah The inventory routing problem (IRP) is a hard combinatorial optimization problem, where a supplier is responsible for maintaining the inventory levels of customers to keep them from running out of product, while maintaining low overall delivery costs. The IRP involves routing and scheduling decisions, and the search space grows exponentially with problem size. Although most of the IRP literature focuses on the objective of minimizing delivery costs over a planning horizon, the logistic ratio (delivery cost per unit of product) has been identified in some studies on real-life companies as a potentially better measure of cost efficiency. This study compares the long term cost difference between optimizing cost and optimizing the logistic ratio by running a series of computational experiments. From the results, it emerges that although optimizing the logistic ratio is indeed beneficial in many cases, optimizing cost may be better in the long term for some problem instances, particularly those with short planning horizons 2016-12-14 Dissertation (University of Nottingham only) NonPeerReviewed application/pdf en https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39170/1/Kwabena%20Ntim%20Amponsah%204233535.pdf Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah (2016) Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)]
spellingShingle Kwabena Ntim, Amponsah
Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
title Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
title_full Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
title_fullStr Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
title_full_unstemmed Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
title_short Heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
title_sort heuristic performance on inventory routing with logistic ratio
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39170/