Ravindra K. Ahuja, Wei Huang, H. Edwin Romeijn, Dolores Romero Morales
A heuristic approach to the multi-period
single-sourcing problem with production and inventory capacities
and perishability constraints
The multi-period single-sourcing problem that we address in this
paper can be used as a tool for evaluating logistics network
designs in a dynamic environment. We consider the assignment of
retailers to facilities, taking into account the timing, location,
and size of production and inventories, in the presence of various
types of constraints. We propose a greedy heuristic, and prove
that this heuristic is asymptotically optimal in a probabilistic
sense when retailer demands share a common seasonality pattern. In
addition, we study several subproblems of the multi-period
single-sourcing problem, and use these to develop an efficient
implementation of a Very Large-Scale Neighborhood Search
improvement heuristic. We perform extensive tests on a set of
randomly generated problems, and conclude that the heuristic
produces very high quality solutions in limited time.