A MIP Model for Commodity Warehousing and Distribution Problem

Companies are continuously looking for ways to improve their performance and stay competitive in their markets. In order to achieve the commercial goals, companies have to pay special attention to the distribution network. Warehousing and distribution of commodities to serve customers’ demand are important tasks in supply chain network. The effective and successful management of the distribution network results in meeting the customers needs directly or indirectly from plants. In this paper, a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation is proposed for Commodity Warehousing and Distribution Problem. The model determined the location of the commodities to be accumulated and decided how customer should be served while minimizing overall costs. In this network under certain condition, the customers can receive their needs directly from plants or warehousing, and each node can rule retailers and/or wholesalers. Also, a solution algorithm based on Benders decomposition was described to solve the problem. The algorithm performance was promising and computational experimentation revealed that, for randomly generated problems, the use of such integer programs helped greatly in obtaining good quality solutions.

کلیدواژه ها:

Mixed Integer Programming ، Commodities ، Warehousing ، Distribution ، Benders decomposition