A Heuristic Solution for the Inventory Constrained Ship Routing for Multi-Commodity Bulk

We developed two heuristic methods to solve the problem considering a fleet of ships delivering chemical products from terminals to terminals. We need to decide how much of each product to carry, on which ship, subject to the conditions that all terminals must have sufficient products to meet demand, and the stock levels of the products cannot exceed the inventory capacity of that terminal. Mathematical formulation and the optimal objective value for the small size problems are compared with two greedy heuristic methods developed in terms of solution qualities and computing time. Numerical experiments on test problems indicate that the heuristics are effective at finding good solutions quickly