Solution Methods for the Integrated Production Routing Problem

Abstract

This paper addresses the Production Routing Problem (PRP). In this problem we make integrated decisions about the number of products to be manufactured, the number of products to be delivered to each customer and the routes of the vehicles used to deliver the manufactured products. The integrated problem attempts to minimize both production and distribution costs, over all periods of a finite planning horizon. An Integer Programming Model is presented and model-based heuristics are proposed to tackle the PRP. Computational results are shown for both benchmark and proposed instances, in order to compare the proposed solution method with a high-performance commercial solver. The results show that our approach outperforms the commercial solver in getting high-quality solutions in instances with more than 10 customers and 5 products.

Keywords

• Production Planning
• Distribution Scheduling
• Vehicle Routing
• Production Routing Problem
• Integer Programming