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.