A Tabu search heuristic for an integrated production-distribution problem with clustered retailers

摘要

We study an integrated production-distribution planning problem in a particular supply chain structure. The model consists of one supplier that produces and delivers a single product to its customers. The delivery is made using a homogeneous fleet of vehicles. The customers (retailers) are clustered in a region such that the distances between these retailers are negligible compared to the distance of the cluster from the supplier. The objective is to minimize the total cost composed of production, inventory holding, and distribution costs. We developed a Tabu search heuristic to solve the problem. The proposed heuristic is a good compromise between solution quality and required CPU time.