Inventory and Routing Problem of Supply Chain under Carbon Emission Constraint

Sustainable development requires supply chains to operate in a low carbon way, and the inventory and transportation decision in a supply chain has an important influence on its overall carbon emissions. Based on the cooperative concept of jointly managed inventory among the members, this paper takes the multi-period Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) of a two stage supply chain as the research object which has some different characteristics such as supplying transportation, heterogeneous vehicles and emission constraint from the existing researches, builds an Integer Linear Programming(ILP) model under carbon emission constraints for the problem firstly, and then does experiments and analyzes the results on an actual case, finds out that the carbon emissions of a supply chain can be reduced greatly by jointly managing inventory and optimizing transportation routes at the expense of a small operating cost increase. The research results also provide some valuable implications for the low carbon improvement of supply chains.