A Greedy Heuristic for a Three-Level Multi-Period Single-Sourcing Problem
2000-03-31
Research Paper
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In this paper we consider a model for integrating transportation and inventory decisions in a three-level logistics network consisting of plants, warehouses, and retailers (or customers). Our model includes production and throughout capacity constraints, and minimizes production, holding, and tansportation costs in a dynamic environment. We show that the problem can be reformulated as a certain type of assignment problem with convex objective function. Based on this observation, we propose a greedy heuristic for the problem, and illustrate its behaviour on a class of randomly generated problem instances. These experiments suggest that the heuristic may be asymptotically feasible and optimal with probability one in the number of customers.
Keywords
- dynamic demand pattern
- dynamic models
- heuristic solution approaches
- inventory costs
- transportation costs
Classifications using
Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) Classification System
- M11 : Production Management
- M : Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting
- R4 : Transportation Systems
- R49 : Transportation Systems: Other
Automatically Extracted Terms
- problem
- heuristic
- warehouse
- variable
- period t
- assignment
- number
- customer
- period
- management
- warehouse i
- solution
- constraint
- capacity
- assignment problem
- plant
- multi-period single-sourcing problem
- instance
- production
- function
