Decision Support for Agri-Food Supply Chains in the E-Commerce Era: The Inbound Inventory Routing Problem with Perishable Products

We consider an integrated planning problem that combines purchasing, inventory, and inbound transportation decisions in an agrifood supply chain where several suppliers (farmers) offer a subset of products with different selling prices and available quantities. We provide a mixed-integer programming formulation of the problem and a matheuristic decomposition that divides the problem into two stages. First, the purchasing and inventory problem is solved. Second, the capacitated vehicle routing problem is solved using a split CVRP procedure. Computational experiments on a set of generated test instances show that the matheuristic can solve instances of large size within reasonably short computational times, providing better solutions than its MIP counterpart. In future work, it is proposed to develop heuristic approaches to validate the performance of the presented matheuristic and to try other routing cost approximations.