Robust Inventory Routing with Flexible Time Window Allocation

This paper studies a robust maritime inventory routing problem with time windows and stochastic travel times. One of the novelties of the problem is that the length and placement of the time windows are also decision variables. Such problems arise in the design and negotiation of long-term delivery contracts with customers who require on-time deliveries … Read more

Two-Stage Decomposition Algorithms for Single Product Maritime Inventory Routing

We present two decomposition algorithms for single product deep-sea maritime inventory routing problems (MIRPs) that possess a core substructure common in many real-world applications. The problem involves routing vessels, each belonging to a particular vessel class, between loading and discharging ports, each belonging to a particular region. Our algorithms iteratively solve a MIRP by zooming … Read more

MIRPLib – A library of maritime inventory routing problem instances: Survey, core model, and benchmark results

This paper presents a detailed description of a particular class of deterministic single product maritime inventory routing problems (MIRPs), which we call deep-sea MIRPs with inventory tracking at every port. This class involves vessel travel times between ports that are significantly longer than the time spent in port and require inventory levels at all ports … Read more

Flexible Solutions to Maritime Inventory Routing Problems with Delivery Time Windows

This paper studies a Maritime Inventory Routing Problem with Time Windows (MIRPTW) for deliveries with uncertain disruptions. We consider disruptions that increase travel times between ports and ultimately affect the deliveries in one or more time windows. The objective is to find flexible solutions that can withstand unplanned disruptions. We propose a Lagrangian heuristic algorithm … Read more

Approximate Dynamic Programming for a Class of Long-Horizon Maritime Inventory Routing Problems

We study a deterministic maritime inventory routing problem with a long planning horizon. For instances with many ports and many vessels, mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) solvers often require hours to produce good solutions even when the planning horizon is 90 or 120 periods. Building on the recent successes of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) for road-based … Read more

An integer programming approach to the OSPF weight setting problem

Under the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol, traffic flow in an Internet Protocol (IP) network is routed on the shortest paths between each source and destination. The shortest path is calculated based on pre-assigned weights on the network links. The OSPF weight setting problem is to determine a set of weights such that, if … Read more