Abstract
It has been always critical and inevitable to select and assess the appropriate and efficient vendors for the companies such that all the aspects and factors leading to the importance of the select process should be considered. This paper studies the process of selecting the vendors simultaneously in three aspects of multiple criteria, random factors, and reaching efficient solutions with the objective of improvement. Thus, selecting the vendors is introduced in the form of a mixed integer multiobjective stochastic problem and for the first time it is converted by CCGC (min-max) model to a mixed integer nonlinear single objective deterministic problem. As the converted problem is nonlinear and solving it in large scale will be time-consuming then the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is used to solve it. Also, in order to better understand ABC efficiency, a comparison is performed between this algorithm and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and Lingo software output. The results obtained from a real example show that ABC offers more efficient solutions to the problem solving in large scale and PSO spends less time to solve the same problem.
Highlights
In a competitive environment, to select and evaluate vendors are among the most important issues ahead of manufacturing companies as the expenses of procuring raw materials largely contribute to the final cost of a product
In order to omit random consequences of the results, the problem of Program (18) was repeated for 25 times in the presence of data related to 10 main vendors, and here the mean value of the objective function, V, and the mean CPU time obtained by artificial bee colony (ABC), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) are considered as the basis of comparisons
The problem of selecting vendors was modeled within the framework of a mixed integer multi-objective stochastic programming problem
Summary
To select and evaluate vendors are among the most important issues ahead of manufacturing companies as the expenses of procuring raw materials largely contribute to the final cost of a product. Taleizadeh et al [20] presented a multibuyer multivendor supply chain problem, in which the demand of each product was stochastic and was following a uniform distribution The model of this problem was of an integer nonlinear programming type and in order to solve it a harmony search algorithm was employed. It is conducted with the objective to improve the vendors’ selection and evaluation process simultaneously at three aspects, that is, multiple criteria, random factors, and achievement of efficient solutions For this purpose, the problem of vendor selection is introduced in the form of a mixed integer multiobjective stochastic problem as converted by CCGC (minmax) [24] into a mixed integer nonlinear single objective deterministic problem.
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