Integrated inventory routing problem with quality time window

An integrated inventory routing problem with deteriorating items is studied in which one supplier with limited production capacity distributes a single item to a set of retailers using homogeneous vehicles. Considering the deterioration of products, we set soft time window during transportation stage to penalize overtime transportation, and hard time window in sales stage. Combining the costs of suppliers and retailers, a two-phase algorithm is developed to minimize the total cost. The first phase is using tabu search to obtain the retailers' ordering matrix. The second phase is to generate production scheduling and distribution routing, adopting saving algorithm and neighborhood search, respectively. Computational experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm, and the management insights to enterprise's deteriorating items supply chain management.