| New research in supply-chain management recognizes that an integrated plan is required that coordinates different functional specialties within a firm; however, little research has focused on synchronizing inventory and transportation decisions. This research develops models that integrate inventory and transportation decisions systems in order to optimize decision variables that have traditionally been optimized sequentially. The results offer a framework for synchronous control policies for integrated inventory and transportation systems. In addition, the research derives new theoretical contributions related to an efficient algorithm for the traveling salesman problem and route failures in fixed partition routing problems with stochastic demand. This dissertation analyzes the problem of distributing units of a product from a warehouse to multiple customers that face stochastic demand. A capacitated vehicle is employed to transport the product from the warehouse to the customers.; This dissertation assumes that the decision maker has real-time inventory levels of the customers and that of the vehicle. This dissertation considers three variations of the problem. These variations differ in the vehicle routing patterns: (1) fixed regions and fixed routes, (2) fixed regions and varied routes, and (3) varied regions and varied routes. Computational results show the performance of each variant for a set of test problems, and statistical analysis evaluates the relative performance among variants, including identification of factors and interactions that affect the performance of each variant. The results demonstrate that the approaches provide efficient and practical solutions to an extremely complex problem. |
