Reducing inventory by the integration between production and distribution decisions

• Grant number: 13/21300-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2014
• End date: January 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Production Engineering - Production Management
• Principal Investigator: Roberto Fernandes Tavares Neto
• Grantee: Marina Andreotti Ogawa
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Exatas e de Tecnologia (CCET). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the last decades, scheduling and routing problems have been studied by studies with relevance both on practical and theoretical fields. From the point of view of the manufacturing, optimization techniques of both problems are used to improve performance measures such as costs and delivery times. From the theoretical point of view, those studies are justified by the existence of a virtually infinite number of NP-Hard problems. Recently, it's shown a grown in the number of publications that deal with joint decisions of production and distribution. In those studies, one can note the practical relevance of this field - since there are reports of financial gain after applying those techniques - and a theoretical relevance - since there are a small number of studies on this theme. In this scenario, this proposal presents a research project in techniques to allow the integration of the production and distribution planning. The production will be represented by a single machine. The distribution, is performed by a single capacitated vehicle. It is expected that this problem will be NP-Hard, since both the production and the distribution problems are NP-Hard. To solve this problem, will be developed solutions based on the following techniques: (I) a Mixed-Integer mathematical model; (II) A meta-heuristic.