Ant Colony Algorithm for Two Stage Supply Chain

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is an evolutionary optimization algorithm inspired by the natural ability of colonies of ants to find the shortest path between their nest and food places by pheromone trail (Arnaout, 2013; Dorigo & Gambardella, 1997). In ACO algorithm, ants communicate information among themselves by leaving a trail using a chemical substance called pheromone. This chapter introduces the development of an ACO-based heuristic for distribution-allocation problem with fixed cost for a transportation route in a two-stage supply chain. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. The following section describes the background for the present research. Then, a brief introduction to the distribution-allocation problem in a twostage supply chain, and the modeling and analysis of distribution-allocation problem in a two-stage supply chain are presented. The penultimate section provides directions for further research. The last section concludes the chapter.