Approaches To Enhance The Performance Of Simheuristic Methods In The Optimisation Of Multi Echelon Logistics Distribution Networks
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Approaches to Enhance the Performance of Simheuristic Methods in the Optimisation of Multi-echelon Logistics Distribution Networks
Management of logistics distribution networks is a challenging task. Decision-makers rely on logistics assistance systems that recommend actions to optimise the networks. These systems can be based on simheuristics to benefit from metaheuristics in exploring possible solutions and on simulation for modelling the networks. This book presents three approaches to recommend promising solutions to optimise the networks with fewer simulation runs. The first approach utilises information from the network to guide the search of metaheuristics. In this approach, domain-specific information is defined and assigned to actions. The metaheuristic algorithm utilises this domain-specific information to find more-promising solutions. The second approach is reducing the number of possible solutions by grouping actions with respect to their domain-specific attributes. Here, the smaller solution space decreases the number of required simulation runs. The last approach looks for equivalent solutions that cause the same changes in the network. This approach aims to skip unnecessary evaluations and, thus, simulation effort.
Advances in Computational Intelligence in Transport, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management
Logistics and supply chain management deal with managing the ?ow of goods or services within a company, from suppliers to customers, and along a supply chain where companies act as suppliers as well as customers. As transportation is at the heart of logistics, the design of tra?c and transportation networks combined with the routing of vehicles and goods on the networks are important and demanding planning tasks. The in?uence of transport, logistics, and s- ply chain management on the modern economy and society has been growing steadily over the last few decades. The worldwide division of labor, the conn- tion of distributed production centers, and the increased mobility of individuals lead to an increased demand for e?cient solutions to logistics and supply chain management problems. On the company level, e?cient and e?ective logistics and supply chain management are of critical importance for a company’s s- cessanditscompetitiveadvantage. Properperformanceofthelogisticsfunctions can contribute both to lower costs and to enhanced customer service. Computational Intelligence (CI) describes a set of methods and tools that often mimic biological or physical principles to solve problems that have been di?cult to solve by classical mathematics. CI embodies neural networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, local search, and machine learning approaches. Researchersthat workinthis areaoften comefromcomputer science,operations research,or mathematics, as well as from many di?erent engineering disciplines. Popular and successful CI methods for optimization and planning problems are heuristic optimization approaches such as evolutionary algorithms, local search methods, and other types of guided search methods.
Heuristics for Base-stock Levels in Multi-echelon Distribution Networks
We study inventory optimization for locally controlled, continuous-review distribution systems with stochastic customer demands. Each node follows a base-stock policy and a first-come, first-served allocation policy. We develop two heuristics, the recursive optimization (RO) heuristic and the decomposition-aggregation (DA) heuristic, to approximate the optimal base-stock levels of all the locations in the system. The RO heuristic applies a bottom-up approach that sequentially solves single-variable, convex problems for each location. The DA heuristic decomposes the distribution system into multiple serial systems, solves for the base-stock levels of these systems using the newsvendor heuristic of Shang and Song (2003), and then aggregates the serial systems back into the distribution system using a procedure we call “backorder matching.” A key advantage of the DA heuristic is that it does not require any evaluation of the cost function (a computationally costly operation that requires numerical convolution). We show that, for both RO and DA, changing some of the parameters, such as leadtime, unit backordering cost, and demand rate, of a location has an impact only on its own local base-stock level and its upstream locations' local base-stock levels. An extensive numerical study shows that both heuristics perform well, with the RO heuristic providing more accurate results and the DA heuristic consuming less computation time. We show that both RO and DA are asymptotically optimal along multiple dimensions for two-echelon distribution systems. Finally, we show that, with minor changes, both RO and DA are applicable to the balanced allocation policy.