Study of Stochastic Demand Inventory Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows Based on MDP

摘要

Compared with related studies of stochastic demand inventory routing problem (IRP), this paper takes the constraints of soft time windows into consideration. Specially, penalties for violating time window limits are included in value function; upper limit of time window is dependent on inventory level. These assumptions of IRP are more practical. Firstly, the paper represents stochastic demand inventory routing problem with soft time windows (IRPSTW) as a discrete time Markov decision process model. Then the paper proposes a solution with considering constraints of soft time windows. Finally the application of this solution is illustrated with a numerical example.