A general variable neighbourhood search for the multi-product inventory routing problem
Résumé
The inventory routing problem (IRP) deals with the study of the inter-relationship between two important activities in the supply chain: transportation of commodities and inventory management. In this paper, we study a variant of the multi-product IRP and we propose a general variable neighbourhood search metaheuristic for solving it. We present several neighbourhood structures based on the movement of quantities between routes and periods. Computational experiments show the efficiency of the proposed metaheuristic when compared with the state-of-the-art based on variable neighbourhood search.