A modified RAND method with application to the multi-buyer joint replenishment problem

The joint replenishment problem (JRP) has been studied extensively during the last two decades. However, there is limited research on dealing with the multi-buyer joint replenishment problem (MJRP) with budget constraint. In this paper, we develop a heuristic based on a modified RAND method proposed in a previous work. The performance of this heuristic is evaluated by a lower bound derived from the associated Lagrangian dual problem. Computational experiments suggest that the proposed heuristic is very efficient.