Inventory-Routing Problems

The inventory routing problem is encountered when implementing a popular business practice called vendor managed inventory replenishment (VMI). With VMI, vendors monitor their customers' inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished, instead of waiting for orders from the customers. This practice has advantages for both vendors and customers. One of the challenging problems encountered is the inventory routing problem, which addresses the coordination of inventory management and transportation. The inventory routing problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, and approximation methods are proposed to find good solutions with reasonable computational effort. The research was motivated by our collaboration with a large manufacturer and distributor of air products.

Anton Kleywegt received a Ph.D. from the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University in 1996 and joined the ISyE faculty this same year as an assistant professor. Anton Kleywegt conducts research in optimization and stochastic modeling with applications in transportation, distribution, and logistics, especially in the following areas: vehicle routing and scheduling, inventory routing, distribution operations, fleet assignment, vendor managed inventory, distribution network design, yield management, terminal design and operations, logistics planning and control, multi-modal transportation, and intelligent transportation systems. He has also worked with Praxair, Columbian Chemicals Company, Delta Air Lines, Manhattan Associates, The Home Depot, and Genuine Parts Company on projects addressing logistics research in vendor managed inventory, fleet sizing and allocation, revenue management, scheduling of order picking, and distribution planning.