A kernel search heuristic for the multivehicle inventory routing problem

In this paper an inventory routing problem is studied in which the goal is to determine an optimal distribution plan to replenish a set of customers by routing a limited fleet of capacitated vehicles over a discrete planning horizon. Each customer consumes a per period quantity of product and has a maximum inventory capacity. The goal is to minimize the total distribution cost that comprises the routing and the inventory holding costs. A matheuristic is presented, which uses the information gathered by a tabu search to build a sequence of mixed-integer linear programming problems of small size. Extensive computational experiments are conducted on a large set of benchmark instances. The results show that the matheuristic outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of average solution quality.