A green multi-period inventory routing problem with pickup and split delivery: A case study in flour industry

In this study, we proposes a multi-period inventory routing problem with pickup and split delivery for distributing flour among bakeries. This study aims to determine the routes for heterogeneous vehicles with different loading capacity and, at the same time, decrease the cost of the system by enabling the pickup and split delivery at customer nodes. Also, we incorporate the environmental aspects into our modeling framework to reduce the adverse effect of transportation operations. We formulate the problem as a bi-objective multi-period inventory routing problem with pickup and split delivery. The proposed framework incorporates different strategical and operational decisions to optimize the supply chain network. We evaluate the performance of the model with and without the pickup option through an illustrative example. From the algorithm perspective, we implemented a priori method to solve the proposed formulation. We performed numerous experiments on real instances to showcase the application of the proposed framework on real-world problems. Finally, we provided the Pareto solution set for decision-makers to choose the best solutions based on their preference.