Incorporating location, routing and inventory decisions in supply chain network design

This paper for the first time presents a novel model to simultaneously optimize location, allocation, capacity, inventory, and routing decisions in a stochastic supply chain system. Each customer's demand is uncertain and follows a normal distribution, and each distribution center maintains a certain amount of safety stock. To solve the model, first we present an exact solution method by casting the problem as a mixed integer convex program, and then we establish a heuristic method based on a hybridization of Tabu Search and Simulated Annealing. The results show that the proposed heuristic is considerably efficient and effective for a broad range of problem sizes. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.