Abstract

The Fixed Charge Transportation Problem (FCTP) is a Linear Programming (LP) class, whereby the total shipping cost of a product, from a source to a destination, consists of a unit transportation cost, proportional to the amount of sent items and a fixed charge associated with the opening of the route. The FCTP is NP-hard and has a characteristic in which, as far as the difference between the value of the unit cost and the fixed charge increases, the computational time changes, worsening the performance. This paper purpose a matheuristic approach to the FCTP which results were good when compared to other methods available in the Literature.

 

Abstract

In the Coordinated Delivery Problem (CDP), we study the passive and proactive coordination strategies that coordinate the delivery among urban retail stores. We formulate the CDP as mixed integer programs and develop a matheuristic, the effectiveness of which is evaluated via newly generated instances. Our numerical study shows that, when the stores prefer placing orders based on their own inventory policies, the proactive coordination strategy is able to achieve similar logistics and services performances to Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), while respecting the store order decisions as under Retailer Managed Inventory (RMI), and thus offers an excellent combination of VMI and RMI.