An efficient evolutionary computation approach for the vending machine inventory control problem

Abstract

This paper considers the policy of economic order quantity for the geographically distributed vending machine inventory control problem. In the problem, the economic order policy for each product and the quantity of each type of product for every vending machine are to be decided simultaneously so as to maximize the total expected profit. Due to each ordering cost follows the corresponding skip function, the proposed problem belongs to the polynomial concave problem. Also, the optimal economic ordering quantity is based on the random demand for each type of product in different vending machine. Since the above reasons, it will be very hard to find the close form solution effectively and efficiently by using the mathematical programming approaches. In this research, a hybrid evolutionary computation (EC) approach has been applied to solve the problem efficiently and effectively. Experimental results are presented to exhibit the superior performance of the proposed methodology for solving the economic order quantity with quantity discount problem.