Models for a Class of Sustainable Supply Chain Routing Problems: Application to Reverse, Constrained, Resilient, Balanced, Responsive and Collaborative Supply Chain

by P. Sivakumar

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is widely dealt with in the last four decades. Methodologies were developed for many variants of VRP by different researchers. This work considers six set of variants of the aforesaid problem normally encountered in sustainable supply chain routing (SSCR) context but have not been given attention to hitherto. These variants of the classical VRP are complex and pertaining to six domains of SSCR. Simultaneous pick-up and delivery problem with maximum route length in the context of reverse supply chain, sequenced pick-up and delivery problem with time windows and heterogeneous vehicles in the domain of constrained supply chain, flexible pick-up and delivery problem with time windows and heterogeneous vehicles in the perspective of resilient supply chain, balanced allocation and routing optimization problem in responsive supply chain, inventory level allocation and routing optimization problem in responsive supply chain and multi-criteria allocation and routing optimization problem in distribution and sourcing channel in collaborative supply chain are the new variants proposed in this research.

272 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2012