Solution procedure
In this section, we propose a solution procedure for the problem presented in the previous section. The objective function
(1)–(6) is non-convex and the problem is clearly difficult. Our goal is to propose a simple heuristic able to design large supply
chains and reveal the benefits of good inventory management. For this purpose, we take advantage of the particular formulation
that we devised. We first show that the problem simplifies when the variables Kd, the total flows through DCs, are
fixed.