Title: An integrated production and distribution problem with direct shipment: a case from Moroccan bottled-water market

Authors: Jamal Lmariouh; Nizar El Hachemi; Mohamed Anouar Jamali; Driss Bouami; Louis Martin Rousseau

Addresses: Quality, Security and Maintenance Laboratory, Mohammedia School of Engineers (EMI), Rabat, Morocco; CELOG, School of Textile and Clothing Industries (ESITH), Casablanca, Morocco ' MOAD/SCM, Mohammedia School of Engineers, Rabat, Morocco ' Research and Development Direction, School of Textile and Clothing Industries (ESITH), Casablanca, Morocco ' Quality, Security and Maintenance Laboratory, Mohammedia School of Engineers, Rabat, Morocco ' CIRRELT, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

Abstract: We consider an industrial application encountered in the Moroccan context that involves the production and distribution of bottled water. Our industrial partner owns one plant from which all requests are delivered in direct shipments and usually full truckloads to the customers (a set of regional depots and wholesalers). We must take into account the production, the delivery requirements, multiple products, and inventory levels. The objective is to minimise the sum of the production, transportation, and inventory costs. We propose a mixed integer linear program for a variant of the multi-vehicle, multi-product production routing problem. Experiments have been conducted using CPLEX 12.3.0, and almost all instances were solved with a reasonable optimality gap. The results show that significant savings can be obtained by using our approach with respect to the current company practice.

Keywords: production planning; vendor-managed inventory; bottled-water; production-distribution problem; Morocco.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2019.096942

International Journal of Operational Research, 2019 Vol.34 No.1, pp.144 - 160

Received: 10 Sep 2015
Accepted: 13 Mar 2016
Published online: 14 Dec 2018 *

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