MODELING, COMPUTATION AND OPTIMIZATION, cilt.6, ss.171-189, 2009 (SCI-Expanded)
We consider a one supplier - multiple retailers system over a finite planning horizon. Retailers have external demands for a single product and their inventories are controlled by the supplier based on order-up-to level inventory policy. The problem is to determine the time and the quantity of product to order for the supplier, the retailers to be visited in any period, the quantity of product to be delivered in these visits and the vehicle routes for deliveries so as to minimize system-wide inventory and routing costs. We present a Lagrangian relaxation based solution procedure and implement the procedure on test instances. Computational study shows that fairly good solutions are found in reasonable time.