Simulating and designing the stochastic inbound inventory routing problem

We consider the situation where parts from suppliers have to be picked up by a capacitated vehicle for an assembly plant that faces stochastic demand. We propose a two-phase heuristic to calculate "good" base stock policies for the stochastic inbound inventory routing problem. In this paper, we calculate multiple performance measures for the results obtained from the analytical model. The results show that the maximum average utilization of the vehicle is a significant factor in determining our fill rate. We consider several test cases to substantiate the results. The interactions between the performance measures for different situations are also discussed.