using electromagnetism algorithm for determining the number of kanbans in a multi-stage supply chain system

this paper studies the multi-stage supply chain system (msscm) controlled by the kanban mechanism. in the kanban system, decision making is based on the number of kanbans as well as batch sizes. a kanban mechanism is employed to assist in linking different production processes in a supply chain system in order to implement the scope of just-in-time (jit) philosophy. for a msscm, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (minlp) problem is formulated from the perspective of jit delivery policy where a kanban may reflect to a transporter. since the adopted model is of minlp type and solving it by branch and bound (b&b) takes time, a metaheuristic is presented. this metaheuristic is an electromagnetic algorithm (ea). the ea is compared against an existing algorithm and also b&b results to evaluate the proposed metaheuristic. extensive experiments and statistical analyses demonstrate that our proposed em is more efficient than b&b with regard to the objective functions considered in this paper.