Supply Chain Management: An Evolutionary Computing Approach

The main purpose of the proposed book is to elucidate the reader about the scope and application of evolutionary algorithms in solving supply chain problems. The book shall cover a wide range of supply chain aspects such as inventory control, capacity allocation, facility location, bullwhip effect, warehousing, cost, quality, delivery time and so on. These concepts shall be enumerated in a form that can be easily assimilated by the reader. Then we shall solve problems related to these using various evolutionary computing techniques such as GA and its variants, PSO, tabu search, simulated annealing, bacterial foraging, SVM and ant colony optimization. The problems will be solved and the solutions will be discussed in wider detail to give the reader a strong theoretical and analytical background. Also, on many instances we shall compare and contrast solutions obtained using different algorithms and throw light on their practical relevance. Appendices on the evolutionary algorithms shall be provided so that beginners can learn and understand them and experts can use them for reference. We shall begin with an introductory chapter on supply chain network design. This chapter will focus on solving the basic problems of capacity allocation, warehousing and so on. A sample problem shall be taken and solved using GA and its variants. We would like to use this as the stepping stone for the subsequent chapters which will cover more complex problems of supply chain which shall be solved in an easily understandable form using a variety of evolutionary computing techniques. This shall be done so by solving more problems such as bullwhip effect, multi objective problems etc. in the subsequent chapters by introducing new evolutionary algorithms in each chapter and comparing them with the ones already demonstrated. By the end of the book we expect the reader to have a deep understanding of problems of supply chain and also appreciate the evolutionary computation techniques in solving these problems.