A New Approach on the Stochastic Inventory Routing Problem

A long-term Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) is programmed in a new way. Focusing on the customers with stochastic demands, three policies of the IRP are studied, which are policy of fixed regions and fixed routes, policy of fixed regions and varied routes, and policy of varied regions and varied routes. And under the three policies, the IRP is solved by using newsvendor inventory model, sweep algorithm, periodic stochastic inventory policy and savings algorithm respectively. And thus the optimal delivery quantity for each customer and the total shortest distribution distance in each policy are found, which offers new approaches for the study of the stochastic IRP.