| This dissertation seeks to determine good, and sometimes optimal, policies for route design and inventory management of inbound parts which are to be delivered for manufacturing, processing, or distribution operations. The need to simultaneously consider pickup routes and inventory management at a plant is not only important from a logistics standpoint, but is a practical problem faced by actual companies. In particular, a manufacturing facility wishes to coordinate pickups from multiple suppliers in an efficient and cost-effective manner, but has a limited amount of storage space in which to house inventory. The frequency with which suppliers are visited and the quantity that is picked up must be coordinated with the production schedule of the manufacturing facility, the storage space it has allocated for inventory, and capacity restrictions imposed by the vehicles used.; We develop heuristics that consider the inventory and routing decisions in alternating order as well as a heuristic that makes the decisions in an iterative fashion. Comparing multiple approaches allows us to evaluate the benefits of incorporating the storage constraint at different stages in the planning process. We develop a lower bound as a benchmark for the heuristic solutions and show that near optimal solutions can be obtained in a reasonable amount of time by utilizing information about the amount of storage space in the route selection process. Finally, we extend the heuristics by incorporating additional constraints that allow us to closely model practical considerations found in industry. |
