We investigate an integrated inventory routing problem (IRP) in which one supplier with limited production capacity distributes a single item to a set of retailers using homogeneous vehicles. In the objective function we consider a loading cost which is often neglected in previous research. Considering the deterioration in the products, we set a soft time window during the transportation stage and a hard time window during the sales stage, and to prevent jams and waiting cost, the time interval

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... of two successive vehicles returning to the supplier's facilities is required not to be overly short. Combining all of these factors, a two-echelon supply chain mixed integer programming model under discrete time is proposed, and a two-phase algorithm is developed. The first phase uses tabu search to obtain the retailers' ordering matrix. The second phase is to generate production scheduling and distribution routing, adopting a saving algorithm and a neighbourhood search, respectively. Computational experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm.