Dimensionality-reduction procedure for the capacitated p-median transportation inventory problem

The capacitated p-median transportation inventory problem with heterogeneous fleet (CLITraP-HTF) aims to determine an optimal solution to a transportation problem subject to location-allocation, inventory management and transportation decisions. The novelty of CLITraP-HTF is to design a supply chain that solves all these decisions at the same time. Optimizing the CLITraP-HTF is a challenge because of the high dimension of the decision variables that lead to a large and complex search space. The contribution of this paper is to develop a dimensionality-reduction procedure (DRP) to reduce the CLITraP-HTF complexity and help to solve it. The proposed DRP is a mathematical proof to demonstrate that the inventory management and transportation decisions can be solved before the optimization procedure, thus reducing the complexity of the CLITraP-HTF by greatly narrowing its number of decision variables such that the remaining problem to solve is the well-known capacitated p-median problem (CPMP). The conclusion is that the proposed DRP helps to solve the CLITraP-HTF because the CPMP can be and has been solved by applying different algorithms and heuristic methods.