Efficient Methods for Inventory Routing Problem of Perishable Items with Fixed Life

Organizations are working to reduce warehousing and transportation costs, expanding supply chain management. Transportation and inventory are the two main elements in the supply chain. The issue of routing-inventory is the consistent distribution of the product from one or more distribution points among the consumer group, which minimizes the average cost of distribution along the planning horizon without creating a shortage for the organization is the primary goal of this study. This study addresses this issue in perishable products with a fixed lifespan. A very critical area of vehicle routing is the inventory routing issue. The most important objectives of this research were to review the studies conducted in the field of routing-inventory, inventory management, routing of perishable goods, implementing the cost minimization goal in the proposed mathematical model, and developing appropriate approaches to solve the proposed model under the assumptions of this research.

Given the nature of the problem that comes from NP-hard types, It is impossible to arrive at a definitive answer for its large dimensions, so this study proposes a method based on the ant colony algorithm algorithm, which solves the inventory routing problem under new assumptions. In this study, this issue was addressed in perishable products with a fixed lifespan.

It was shown that the proposed algorithm is capable of solving problems in different dimensions, especially where it seems impossible to achieve global optimality. Experiments on different benchmarks all confirmed the optimality of the results over competing algorithms and guided us to achieve the research objective of minimizing costs.