Maritime location inventory routing problem for island supply chain network under periodic freight demand

Abstract

This study proposes a model for island supply chain network design that integrates a maritime location inventory routing problem (MLIRP) and considers the periodic freight demand in the network. Owing to the complexity of the MLIRP, a bi-level parallel memetic algorithm (BPMA) was developed for solving the model. The proposed approach was tested on a set of MLIRP instances based on real-life islands in South China Sea and a set of existing benchmark MIRP instances from the literature. The results of the numerical analysis illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis was carried out to understand the impacts of various parameters on the changes in total cost.