Savings Heuristic for the Inventory Routing Problem

The Inventory Routing is a combination of the Vehicle Routing Problem and the Lot-Sizing problem. It combines both optimization approaches in order to find an optimal solution for a transportation and storing problem. Area of application is a single product delivered from a central depot to multiple customers by identical vehicles with limited capacity and route length. With the generated algorithm written in the computer language Java it is possible to solve the problem with drastic savings of time and at a close to optimal outcome, compared to solving Mixed Integer Problems solved with conventional optimization software. The created algorithm uses the Savings Heuristic to find the best solution.