Bi-criterion optimisation for configuring an assembly supply chain using Pareto ant colony meta-heuristic

Pareto Ant Colony Optimisation: a Meta-heuristic Approach to Supply Chain Design

This paper proposes a new approach to determining the supply chain (SC) design for a product comprising different subassemblies. There might be multiple suppliers that could supply the same components as well as many manufacturers that could assemble the product. Each of these options is differentiated by its lead time and cost. Given all the possible options the configuration problem is to sel...

Using Ant Colony Meta-heuristic Approach for Cellular Manufacturing System

Grouping the machines and parts in a manufacturing system, based on similarities is known as cell formation problem. The problem is clustering items to form identified and specific groups having similar properties. Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) can be defined as an application of Group Technology (GT) philosophy that allows decomposing a manufacturing system into subsystems to make it eas...

Meta-heuristic Algorithms for an Integrated Production-Distribution Planning Problem in a Multi-Objective Supply Chain

In today's globalization, an effective integration of production and distribution plans into a unified framework is crucial for attaining competitive advantage. This paper addresses an integrated multi-product and multi-time period production/distribution planning problem for a two-echelon supply chain subject to the real-world variables and constraints. It is assumed that all transportations a...

The Ant Colony Optimization Meta-Heuristic

Ant Colony Optimization: A New Meta-Heuristic

Recently, a number of algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies have been applied to the solution of difficult discrete optimization problems. In this paper we put these algorithms in a common framework by defining the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. A couple of paradigmatic examples of applications of these novel meta-heuristic are given, as well as a brief ove...