Simulated Annealing for the Multi-Vehicle Cyclic Inventory Routing Problem

This paper studies the Multi-Vehicle Cyclic Inventory Routing Problem (MV-CIRP) as the extension of the Single-Vehicle CIRP (SV-CIRP). The objective is to minimize both distribution and inventory costs at the customers and to maximize the collected rewards simultaneously. The problem is treated as a single objective optimization problem. A subset of customers is selected for each vehicle including the quantity to be delivered to each customer. For each vehicle, a cyclic distribution plan is developed. We construct a mathematical programming model and propose a simulated annealing (SA) metaheuristic for solving both SV-CIRP and MV-CIRP. For SV-CIRP, experimental results on benchmark instances show that SA is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms and it is able to improve 12 best known solutions. For the MV-CIRP, the results show that SA performs better than an Iterated Local Search algorithm.