Investigation of many to many inventory routing problem to minimise the total cost and the amount of co2 emission in the network

Abstract

Supply chain management provides efficient management in areas that include purchase, inventory control, production, sales and distribution to coordinate the flow of material and information about both in and between the facilities such as suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and customers. Such an efficacy in management is vital between the facilities of the supply chain network involving material newlineshipments between numerous origins and destinations. Origins could be suppliers or manufacturing plants or warehouses or distribution centers. Destinations could be retail outlets or other distribution centers or other manufacturing plants. Transportation and inventory account for around 30% of the total supply chain network cost. Handling transportation and inventory management in a single task is a highly complex approach in real time, but, on the other hand, it provides immense benefits. This approach in the network newlineis commonly referred to as an Inventory Routing Problem (IRP). Further, the increase in awareness pertaining to environmental concerns has drawn the attention of researchers focus on the issues related to transportation and logistics. Therefore, carbon-di-oxide (CO2) emission has been taken into account in the recent IRP studies. However, in the actual manufacturing environment, many suppliers (origins) supply different types of products newline(components) to many customers (destinations) with unique demand for every customer. Similarly, more than one supplier is available for many products i.e., product mix is inevitable in the manufacturing environment. So, this research focuses on IRP network problem of Many-to-Many model handling multiproduct. The solution for the above IRP models gets complicated as the number of origins or destinations or both of the network increases. newline newline newline newline