Research On Inventory Routing Problem Under E-commerce Environment

In recent years, with the development of the information technology and network communication,e-commerce is penetrating into people’s life as a new business model. Logistic industry has a rapid growth and becomes a “Mohican” for each business enterprise. Inventory and transportation cost is an important part of logistics cost as well as the core of supply chain management, the existing literatures often separate the two studies. Because "The Reversal Effect" exists between inventory and transpotation, it is easy to get optimized for one side but hard for the whole supply chain. So the research on the inventory routing problem is of theoretical value and great practical value.This paper studies the inventory and routing problem under e-commerce environment where the contradiction is fiercer. In this type of supply chain network, e-commerce enterprises are usually in decision-making position, in order to reduce the inventory cost and response to the orders rapidly and supply the products continuously, e-commerce companies will require the suppliers to arrange the transport of goods based on their decisions. This model is conductive to e-commerce companies to reduce inventory cost, but will increase the transportation cost of suppliers which will directly damage the e-commerce companies to gain a competitive price of goods and will inevitably harm the long-term interests of both sides. This paper makes a research on inventory and routing problem under e-commerce environment from perspective of systematism and inergration.Firstly, this paper analyzes the necessity and feasibility by studying literatures of domestic and overseas scholars and introduces the definition of inventory routing problem(IRP), characteristics, solutions, algorithms and the function of integrated optimization, which laids the theoretical foundation for the full text; Besides, this paper describles a centralized ordering policy and set up a inventory and routing model to determine the optimal number of shipping and the optimal delivery path under the centralized purchasing strategy of inventory routing problem model and solve the problem with the improved genetic algorithm. Finally, choosing a e-commerce company as an example,applies the model and algorithm to it, the results shows that under the centralized purchasing strategy, it will effectively reduce the total cost of the inventory and transportation. Besides, it verifies the effectiveness and robustness of the dual coding genetic algorithm and shows the rationality of the result.