Integrated inventory-transportation model by synchronizing delivery and production cycles

• An integrated one-vendor multi-buyer inventory-transportation supply chain model is considered.
• Effective and efficient heuristics are developed to solve the problem.
• ALNS is effective for medium/large size supply chain networks.
• The results of the case study demonstrate the practicality of the proposed model.
• Substantial savings on the total cost can be achieved via synchronization.

This paper develops an integrated single-vendor multi-buyer inventory-transportation synchronized supply chain model. In this paper, the decisions of truck assignment and routing are also considered and as a result, a series of vehicle routing problems (VRP) are required to be solved. Due to the highly complicated objective function and the NP-hard VRP problems, the problem cannot be solved analytically. Hence, meta-heuristics are proposed. By means of the numerical examples and a case study, the meta-heuristics developed are shown to be very effective in solving such comprehensive supply chain models, and the results so obtained are promising.