Variety, quality, and rapid response are becoming a trend in customer requirements in the contemporary competitive markets. Thus, an increasing number of manufacturers are frequently seeking alternatives such as redesigning their fabrication scheme and outsourcing strategy to meet the client’s expectations effectively with minimum operating costs and limited in-house capacity. Inspired by the potential benefits of delay differentiation, outsourcing, and quality assurance policies in the multi-item production planning, this study explores a single-machine two-stage multi-item batch fabrication problem considering the abovementioned features. Stage one is the fabrication of all the required common parts, and stage two is manufacturing the end products. A predetermined portion of common parts is supplied by an external contractor to reduce the uptime of stage one. Both stages have imperfect in-house production processes. The defective items produced are identified, and they are either reworked or removed to ensure the quality of the finished batch. We develop a model to depict the problem explicitly. Modeling, formulation, derivation, and optimization methods assist us in deriving a cost-minimized cycle time solution. Moreover, the proposed model can analyze and expose the diverse features of the problem to help managerial decision-making. An example of this is the individual/ collective influence of postponement, outsourcing, and quality reassurance policies on the optimal cycle time solution, utilization, uptime of each stage, total system cost, and individual cost contributors.

In this research, a maximal covering location problem (MCLP) with real-world constraints such as multiple types of facilities and vehicles with different setup costs is taken into account. An original mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is constructed in order to find the optimal solution. Since the problem at hand is shown to be NP-hard, a constructive heuristic method and a meta-heuristic approach based on genetic algorithm (GA) are developed to solve the problem. To find the most effective solution technique, a set of problems of different sizes is randomly generated and solved by the proposed solution methods. Computational results demonstrate that the heuristic method is capable of producing optimal or near-optimal solutions in a rational execution time.

An inventory control system having multiple items in stock is developed in this paper to optimize total cost of inventory and space requirement. Inventory modeling for both the raw material storage and work in process (WIP) is designed considering independent demand rate of items and no volume discount. To make the model environmentally aware, the equivalent carbon emission cost is also incorporated as a cost function in the formulation. The purpose of this study is to minimize the cost of inventories and minimize the storage space needed. The inventory models are shown here as a multi-objective programming problem with a few nonlinear constraints which has been solved by proposing a meta-heuristic algorithm called multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO). A further meta-heuristic algorithm called multi-objective bat algorithm (MOBA) is used to determine the efficacy of the result obtained from MOPSO. Taguchi method is followed to tune necessary response variables and compare both algorithm's output. At the end, several test problems are generated to evaluate the performances of both algorithms in terms of six performance metrics and analyze them statistically and graphically.

A multi-objective methodology was proposed for solving the green vehicle routing problem with a private fleet and common carrier considering workload equity. The iterated local search metaheuristic, which is adapted to the solution of the problem with three objectives, was proposed as a solution method. A solution algorithm was divided into three stages. In the first, initial solutions were identified based on the savings heuristic. The second and third act together using the random variable neighbourhood search algorithm, which allows performing an intensification process and perturbance processes, giving the possibility of exploring new regions in the search space, which are proposed within the framework of optimizing the three objectives. According to the previous review of the state of the art, there is little related literature; through discussions with the productive sector, this problem is frequent due to increases in demand in certain seasons or a part of the maintenance vehicle fleet departing from service. The proposed methodology was verified using case studies from the literature, which were adapted to the problem of three objectives, obtaining consistent solutions. Where cases were not reported in the literature, these could be used as a reference in future research.

In this paper, we consider a two-echelon supply chain in which one warehouse provides a single product to N retailers, using integer-ratio policies. Deterministic version of the problem has been widely studied. However, this assumption can lead to inaccurate and ineffective decisions. In this research, we tackle the stochastic version of two-echelon inventory system by designing an extension of a well-known heuristic. This research considers customer demands as following a normal density function. A set of 240 random instances was generated and used in evaluating both the deterministic and stochastic solution approaches. Due to the nature of the objective function, evaluation was carried out via Monte Carlo simulation. For variable demand settings, computational experiments shows that: i) the use of average demand to define the inventory policy implies an underestimation of the total cost and ii) the newly proposed method offers cost savings.

This paper proposes the cuckoo search (CS), central force optimization (CFO), chemical reaction optimization (CRO) and 3-Opt for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). HCSCROCFO-3Opt, which is the parallel hybrid algorithm that is proposed, is a form of augmented HCSCROCFO with a local search process founded on CS that utilizes positive aspects of the other optimization approaches including CRO and CFO in order to enhance quality of initial population and improve local search, correspondingly. The work is motivated by the need to enhance the computational effectiveness through attainment of improved outcomes compared to previous popular solutions, to explore the features of different parameters of to seek some ideal solutions. The first stage entails solving of CVRP through setting a variety of values to tune parameters for the HCSCROCFO-3Opt proposed. Then initialization of algorithm CS, CRO, CFO parameters are accomplished through tuning parameters within a tuning cycle. Subsequently, a novel solution is swapped in a random manner through a levy flight within the central loop, followed by execution of the hybrid solution as well as new CRO, CFO and CS algorithm solutions, whose implementation is supposed to enhance results for the local 3-Opt. Ultimately, the most ideal solution for general hybrid model’s solution space is identified, after which the solution that is best-suited for the CVRP purposes is presented. Within the standard CVRP cases, reported computational tests in large scale in the literature demonstrate the efficiency of presented approach.

This study explores the optimal fabrication runtime for a buyer-vendor incorporated system featuring repairable items, stochastic breakdown, accelerated rate, and multi-delivery strategy. Operating in today’s competitive global market, transnational production firms make every effort to meet client requirements in terms of the due date and quality goods. Further, they also must handle all inevitable events incurred in the manufacturing process, such as unanticipated equipment breakdowns and defective products, with caution to avoid production schedule delay and cost overrun. To examine such a vendor-buyer incorporated system, we build a model to characterize the aforementioned features in the system. The function of total system cost is derived through formulation and analyses. The optimization method and a recursive algorithm are employed to help in deriving the optimal (i.e., cost minimization) fabrication runtime for our problem. An example numerically illustrates how our model, method, and algorithm work. It also reveals the capability of our model in analyzing the impact of each and/or joint feature(s) (e.g., the breakdown, accelerated rate, rework, multi-delivery strategy) on the system’s utilization, optimal runtime, total expenses, and individual cost contributor to assist in managerial decision making, and hence, enabling the firm to gain competitive advantage.

This study develops a postponement model for the multi-item replenishment decision featuring commonality, an overtime strategy, and product quality reassurance. A single machine is used to meet the steady demand for multiple products wherein product commonality exists among these end products. The proposed postponement model assumes that all pertinent common parts are fabricated in Stage 1 and the finished products are sequentially fabricated in Stage 2. Random nonconformance rates are associated with both fabrication stages, the repairable nonconforming common parts are separated from scrap, and reworking in each cycle helps ensure product quality for each completed batch. An overtime strategy is used to reduce the lengthy fabrication and rework times for common parts. Mathematical analyses and derivation allow us to obtain the total system costs. The optimization method helps find the optimal replenishment decision. We provide a numerical illustration to show (1) how our model works; (2) the individual impact of the system features (e.g., the overtime factor, commonality in terms of the common part completion rate and its relative value, and the issues pertaining to scrap/rework) on the optimal decision, utilization, and the total system cost; and (3) the collective influence of system features on the highlighted problem. This proposed decision-support model helps production managers achieve the operating goals of lowering total system expenses and cutting the length of the production cycle.

Transportation planning in forest industry is a challenging activity since it involves complex decisions about raw material allocation, vehicle routing and scheduling of trucks arrivals to both harvest areas and the plants. In the Argentine context, specifically in the Argentinean Northeast (NEA) region, the forest industry plays essential role for the economic development and, among the included activities, the transportation is the key element considering the volumes that must be moved and the distances to be traveled. Therefore, enhancing efficiency in the transportation activity improves significantly the performance of this industry. In this work, a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is presented, where raw material allocation, vehicle routing and scheduling of trucks arrivals are simultaneously addressed. Since the resolution times of the proposed integrated MILP model are prohibitive for large instances, a hierarchical approach is also presented. The considered decomposition approach involves two stages: in the first phase, the raw material allocation and vehicle routing problems are solved through a MILP model, while in the second phase, fixing the route for each truck according to the results of the previous step, the scheduling of truck arrivals to both the harvest areas and the plants is solved through a new MILP model. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is very effective and could be easily applied in this industry.

Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is considered as one of the most famous specialized forms of VRP that has attracted considerable attention from researchers. This problem belongs to complex combinatorial optimization problems included in the NP-Hard Problem category, which is a problem that needs difficult computation. This paper presents an improvement of Ant Colony System (ACS) to solve this problem. In this study, the problem deals with a few vehicles which are used for transporting products to specific places. Each vehicle starts from a main location at different times every day. The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is defined to serve a group of delivery customers with known demands. The proposed study seeks to find the best solution of CVRP by using improvement ACS with the accompanying targets: (1) To decrease the distance as long distances negatively affect the course of the process since it consumes a great time to visit all customers. (2) To implement the improvement of ACS algorithm on new data from the database of CVRP. Through the implementation of the proposed algorithm better results were obtained from the results of other methods and the results were compared.