Meta-heuristic approaches for fixed-charge solid transportation problem in two-stage supply chain network

Abstract

This paper introduces a mathematical model for fixed-charge solid transportation problem for a two-stage supply chain network, considering simultaneously both variable and fixed costs. Existence of the fixed costs and thereupon NP-hardness of the problem, use of meta-heuristics is necessary. Therefore, three approaches as genetic algorithm, electromagnetism-like algorithm and charged system search in accordance with priority-based encoding are developed. Contrary to previous researches which considered conveyances for one stage supply chain, here, conveyances are considered in each stage of the supply chain network for the first time. To determine the parameters’ levels and the introduced operators of the algorithms that exhibit best solution, a Taguchi experimental design method is applied. This experimental design decreases the required number of experiments. As final experiment, the performance of the proposed algorithms are compared with each other by running them with different problem sizes.