Research On The Inventory And Routing Problem Under VMI Based On Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

With the globalization of the economic and the rapid development of technology, the competition of the enterprises increasingly fierce, and the competition among individual enterprises has been upgraded to that of the supply chain. In this background, the idea of vendor managed inventory (VMI) emerged, it broke the traditional inventory mode where each does things in their own ways and uses systemic and integrated inventory management. In the logistics system, there has the problem of "trade-off" between transportation and inventory. The vendor managed inventory (VMI) is devoted to solve optimized taking into consideration the intergration and optimization of inventory and transportation.In the first place,through the analysis of relevant literature and summary, the article reviewed domestic and foreign researches is given. In addition,this paper makes a summary of widely the theoretical knowledge of the IRP, including the definition, characteristics, modeling and solution algorithm which discusses details of Ant Colony Optimization. Secondly, the model for IPR under the VMI is build using the mixed integer programming, the goal was to minimize the total cost and the satisfaction of customer was regarded as the confined condition. Thirdly, this paper constructed an improved Ant Colony Optimization algorithm to solve the model. Finally, this paper a normative numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness of our model and algorithm by MATLAB programming.This study have a great significance in many aspects. In the view of the theory, it can enrich the theoretical system of the inventory routing problem(IRP). In the view of the economic, it can reduce logistics costs by guiding the enterprises to make the operations of logistics more efficient, enhancing its economic benefits.