Multi-objective inventory control using electromagnetism-like meta-heuristic

Abstract

Most of the works on multi-objective inventory control unify the various objectives into a single objective such that lead to a compromise solution whose non-dominance is not guaranteed. This paper presents an algorithm based on Electromagnetism-like Mechanism (EM) to solve a multi-objective inventory control problem with cost and shortage minimization objectives. EM is a new meta-heuristic originated from the electromagnetism theory in physics; it simulates attraction and repulsion of charged particles in order to move towards the optimum. A framework, so called Multi-Objective EM (MOEM), is proposed to approximate the well-known efficient solutions of order size and safety stock without using any surrogate measure (e.g. service level or shortage cost) and prior preference information from decision-makers. To give a specific compromise solution, any outranking method can be implemented to prioritize the non-dominated solutions for decision-makers. Finally, this could be the first attempt to apply EM to multi-objective inventory control, even the inventory control problems.