Decomposing inventory routing problems with approximate value functions

✍ Scribed by Alejandro Toriello; George Nemhauser; Martin Savelsbergh

• Book ID: 102545150
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 117 KB
• Volume: 57
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-069X
• DOI: 10.1002/nav.20433

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

We present a time decomposition for inventory routing problems. The methodology is based on valuing inventory with a concave piecewise linear function and then combining solutions to single‐period subproblems using dynamic programming techniques. Computational experiments show that the resulting value function accurately captures the inventory's value, and solving the multiperiod problem as a sequence of single‐period subproblems drastically decreases computational time without sacrificing solution quality. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010