Thesis Defense - Ceren Gültekin (MSIE)

Ceren Gültekin – M.Sc. Industrial Engineering

Assoc. Prof. Okan Örsan Özener– Advisor

Date: 10.06.2021

Time: 11:00

Location: This meeting will be held ONLINE. Please send an e-mail to gizem.bakir@ozyegin.edu.tr in order to participate in this defense.

An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for the Multi-Compartment Inventory Routing Problem

Thesis Committee:

Assoc. Prof. Okan Örsan Özener, Özyeğin University

Assoc. Prof. Ali Ekici, Özyeğin University

Asst.  Prof.  Mehmet Önal, Özyeğin University

Asst.  Prof.  İhsan Yanıkoğlu, Özyeğin University

Assoc.  Prof.  Ertan Yakıcı, Milli Savunma Üniversitesi

Abstract:

In this thesis study, we concentrate on an inventory routing problem with a fleet of multi-compartment vehicles which enables the distribution of different products to customers on a delivery route. Using separate compartments on a vehicle increases profitability and customer satisfaction when customer demands vary over a product and period basis. We assume that the compartment that each product can be loaded is known and the capacities of the compartments are fixed. Customers have preset storage capacities and distribution plans should be made in a way that no customers would face stock-outs for any product on any day. We observe the practices of this variant in the distribution of foods with different temperature needs to groceries, feed distribution to livestock farms, and collection of different types of recyclable wastes. We examine this problem separately for three assumptions considering different cases of allowing/disallowing split delivery to customers. We propose a matheuristic approach to solve the addressed problem where we systematically integrate an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search algorithm with mathematical programming models. We generate a set of instances and test the performance of our algorithm by comparing it with the results obtained by a flow formulation adapted from the literature. We observe that the best results we find for each instance are only 11.7% worse than the solutions found by the flow formulation on average.

Bio: 

Ceren Gültekin graduated from Adem Tolunay Anatolian High School in 2013. She earned her B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Özyeğin University in June 2018. She has been pursuing her M.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering at Özyeğin University since September 2018, under the supervision of Dr. Okan Örsan Özener and Dr. Ali Ekici. Her research interests include supply chain management and logistics and she is eager to explore various branches of operations research and operations management.