Analysis of effective sets of routes for the split-delivery periodic inventory routing problem
研究了战术层面的库存路径问题，其中初始库存水平为决策变量，提出了一类数学启发式方法，通过设计有效的路径子集来求解，并证明了最坏情况下的性能界限和平均情况下的有效性。
We study an Inventory Routing Problem at the tactical planning level, where the initial inventory levels at the supplier and at the customers are decision variables and not given data. Since the total inventory level is constant over time, the final inventory levels are equal to the initial ones, making this problem periodic. We propose a class of matheuristics, in which a route-based formulation of the problem is solved to optimality with a given subset of routes. Our goal is to show how to design effective subsets of routes. For some of them, we prove effectiveness in the worst case, i.e., we provide a finite worst-case performance bound for the corresponding matheuristic. Moreover, we show they are also effective on average, in a large set of instances, when some additional routes are added to this subset of routes. These solutions significantly dominate, both in terms of cost and computational time, the best solutions obtained by applying a branch-and-cut algorithm we design to solve a flow–based formulation of the problem.