On the Impact of Different Inventory Policies on the Solution of the Inventory-Routing Problem with Strict Driving Hours’ Regulations and Driving Speed Limits

Abstract

This work addresses a new Inventory-Routing Problem with realistic characteristics, such as strict driving hours’ regulations and driving speed limits. According to these realistic assumptions, the time needed to perform a route will be strictly bounded by an upper time limit based on the driving hours’ regulations provided by the European Commission. Moreover, the decisions about the speed level selection, for traveling between two network points, will be subject to specific driving speed limits. Moreover, the impact of two inventory policies, the classic (R,Q) replenishment policy and the flexible replenishment policy, on the total supply chain network cost is studied. The consideration of two inventory policies leads to the development of two mixed-integer linear programming models. The computational experiments were conducted on random, small-sized, problem cases, using the state-of-the-art solver, Gurobi. The impact of the two inventory policies on the supply chain network is investigated through a numerical analysis.