COMBINED VEHICLE ROUTING AND INVENTORY ALLOCATION PROBLEM.

The authors address the combined problem of allocating a scarce resource among several locations, and planning deliveries using a fleet of vehicles. Demands are random, and holding and shortage costs must be considered in the decision along with transportation costs. Also shown is how to extend some of the available methods for the deterministic vehicle routing problem to this case. Computational results using one such adaptation show that the algorithm is fast enough for practical work, and that substantial cost savings can be achieved with this approach.

Duke Scholars

Author Paul H. Zipkin Fuqua School of Business