Multi-product multi-period inventory routing problem under stochastic demand in the apparel retailing

Due to the complexity and variability of market demand, the product inventory present characteristics of multiple varieties and fewer batches, thus significantly increasing the difficulty of apparel inventory management. We study a secondary supply chain system with one distribution centre and several stores. To minimise the total system cost, we build a mathematical model which considers inventory management and distribution shipping of multi-product multi-period under stochastic demand. An aggregation strategy is proposed for the categories of apparel goods, and the shortage of products in the warehouse is aggregated to some stores during the process of transportation, to improve inventory turnover efficiency and reduce out-of-stock losses, and a simulated annealing algorithm based on Monte Carlo method is designed accordingly. Compared with the traditional inventory management strategy, the proposed strategy can effectively reduce the out-of-stock cost by 11%, thus reducing the total system cost by 10.6%. © 2024 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.