Title: An integrated inventory and distribution problem for alternative fuel: a matheuristic approach

Authors: Seong Wook Hwang; Seokgi Lee; Sang Jin Kweon

Addresses: College of Business Management, Hongik University, 2639 Sejong-ro, Sejong-si 30016, South Korea ' Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Miami, 1251 Memorial Drive 281, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, 50 UNIST-gil, Ulsan 44919, South Korea

Abstract: Due to the limited driving range of alternative fuel (AF) vehicles and their immature refueling infrastructure, a successful transition to the era of AF vehicles necessitates ensuring stable supply and management of AF in the refueling network. This paper proposes a new mathematical framework to solve an AF inventory and distribution problem in which an AF provider manages and operates the AF refueling network to meet all AF demand in a given time horizon. As a solution method, we present a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model that minimises the sum of AF service, inventory holding, and distribution costs. Furthermore, a matheuristic algorithm hybridising an MIP model and an adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm is designed to solve practical problems of real transportation networks. The proposed matheuristic algorithm is validated with an application to small-size instances and is applied to six states in the USA with real traffic flows. [Received: 18 September 2019; Accepted: 6 November 2020]

Keywords: alternative fuel vehicle; refueling service; inventory routing problem; mixed-integer programming; MIP; adaptive large neighbourhood search; ALNS.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2021.117331

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2021 Vol.15 No.5, pp.711 - 744

Accepted: 06 Nov 2020
Published online: 31 Aug 2021 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article