A New Multi-Criteria ABC Inventory Classification Model Based on a Simplified Electre III Method and the Continuous Variable Neighborhood Search

. ABC analysis is one of the most widely used techniques in inventory management to classify items into three ordered categories called A, B and C, where category A contains the most important items and category C includes the least important ones. The ABC classification of inventory items is based on their performance expressed by weighted scores. In this paper, a new ABC classification model based on a simplified ELECTRE III method will be used as an aggregation procedure to compute the items scores. Since the application of the simplified ELECTRE III requires the knowledge of some parameter values (e.g. indifference, preference and veto thresholds), the Continuous Variable Neighborhood Search (CVNS) metaheuristic is used for their estimation. To analyze the performance of the proposed classification model with respect to some existing models, a benchmark dataset from an Hospital Respiratory Therapy Unit (HRTU) is used