A Survey on Variable Neighborhood Search Methods for Supply Network Inventory

Abstract

Over the past two decades, reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain networks have gained substantial interest in business and academia. The dynamic lot-sizing problem with product returns and recovery is one of the most extensively researched topics in inventory control literature. Several interesting generalizations of this optimization problem have lately emerged that include the multiproduct case, the case with capacity constraints, and others. In this chapter, we present recent successful applications of variable neighborhood search (VNS) for the efficient solution of such problems, review the state-of-the-art solution methods, and also discuss some future research directions.