Inventory routings problems for the management of Returnable Transportation Items with durability constraints

RTIs managements are quite diverse. Research efforts are thus needed in the areas of RTI acquisition; warehouse layout, inventory routing problem; production planning and control; tracking and scheduling. In this paper, the inventory-routing problem for the management of RTIs developed in Iassinovskaia et al. (2017) has been enriched by adding constraints referring to specificities that can be encountered in real life, such as minimum threshold or a maximum ceiling of RTIs to be returned or durability. Durability can be characterized by the number of times an RTI can be used which is called maximum number of lives n. For instances, glass bottle can be used 25 times, wooden pallet 50 times and Crates for bottles 120 times (Geyer et al., 2007).