The Continuous Joint Replenishment Problem is Strongly NP-Hard

Abstract

The Continuous Periodic Joint Replenishment Problem (CPJRP) has been one of the core and most studied problems in supply chain management for the last half a century. Nonetheless, despite the vast effort put into studying the problem, its complexity has eluded researchers for years. Although the CPJRP has one of the tighter constant approximation ratio of 1.02, a polynomial optimal solution to it was never found. Recently, the discrete version of this problem was finally proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we extend this result and finaly prove that the CPJRP problem is also strongly NP-hard.