Abstract
Article history: Received March 19, 2012 Received in Revised form June, 20, 2012 Accepted 22 June 2012 Available online June 24 2012 The aim of this paper is to present mathematical models optimizing all materials flows in supply chain. In this research a fuzzy multi-objective nonlinear mixedinteger programming model with piecewise linear membership function is applied to design a multi echelon supply chain network (SCN) by considering total transportation costs and capacities of all echelons with fuzzy objectives. The model that is proposed in this study has 4 fuzzy functions. The first function is minimizing the total transportation costs between all echelons (suppliers, factories, distribution centers (DCs) and customers). The second one is minimizing holding and ordering cost on DCs. The third objective is minimizing the unnecessary and unused capacity of factories and DCs via decreasing variance of transported amounts between echelons. The forth is minimizing the number of total vehicles that ship the materials and products along with SCN. For solving such a problem, as nodes increases in SCN, the traditional method does not have ability to solve large scale problem. So, we applied a Meta heuristic method called Genetic Algorithm. The numerical example is real world applied and compared the results with each other demonstrate the feasibility of applying the proposed model to given problem, and also its advantages are discussed. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Highlights
A supply chain is a set of a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution of these finished products to customers
A supply chain is a network of organizations that are involved, through upstream and downstream linkages, in various processes and activities that produce value in the form of products and services delivered to the ultimate consumer (Verma & Seth, 2011)
The decisions variables of model are coming as follow: fkj Quantity of the product transformed from kth factory to jth distribution centers (DCs) bsk Quantity of raw material transformed from sth supplies to kth factory qji Quantity of the product transformed from DC j to ith customer ηsk Quantity of expected vehicles needs to ship the material from sth supplier to kth ηkj Quantity of expected vehicles needs to ship the product from kth factory to jth DC
Summary
A supply chain is a set of a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution of these finished products to customers. In today’s global market, if an enterprise wish to succeed in a business environment, it must manage and design its entire supply chain network (SCN). This is obvious that the traditional and usual SCN methods are not sufficient to satisfy conscious customers anymore. It should be noted that supply chain management has traditionally been viewed as a process wherein raw materials are converted into final products, delivered to the end-consumer (Fortes, 2009). This process is involving extraction and exploitation of the natural resources (Srivastava, 2007).
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