A convex reformulation for the cyclic inventory routing problem

International audienceThe SV-CIRP is an optimization problem consisting of finding a recurring distribution plan, from a single depot to a selected subset of retailers, that maximizes the collected rewards from the visited retailers while minimizing transportation and inventory costs. One of the main complications in developing solution methods for the SV-CIRP is the non-convexity of the objective function. We demonstrate how the problem can be reformulated so that its continuous relaxation is a convex optimization problem