The production routing problem over a time horizon

What is it about?

The problem is to decide on when and how much to produce and stock at the plant, when and how much to serve and stock at each retailer, and vehicle routes for shipments such that the sum of fixed production setup cost, variable production cost, distribution cost, and inventory carrying cost at the plant and retailers are minimized.

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Why is it important?

A multi-phase heuristic is proposed for the problem. The computational experiments on benchmark instances show favourable results with regard to the quality of the solutions found at the expense of higher computing times on large instances. In particular, the heuristic managed to find new best solutions for the 65% of benchmark instances.

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