ISSN 2736-1721
Global Journal of Business Management ISSN 6731-4538 Vol. 5 (2), pp. 001-004, February, 2011. © International Scholars Journals
Full Length Research Paper
A heuristic approach for designing a distribution network in a supply chain system
Vahidreza Golmohammadi1*, Hamid Afshari2, Amir Hasanzadeh2 and Meisam Rahimi2
1Faculty of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, Islamic Azad University of Qazvin, Qazvin Branch, Qazvin, Iran.
2Department of Industrial Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Accepted 13 November, 2010
Abstract
One of the most important problems in supply chain management is the distribution network design problem system which involves locating production plants and distribution warehouses, and determining the best strategy for distributing the product from the plants to the warehouses and from the warehouses to the customers. Unlike most of past research, our study allows for multiple levels of capacities available to the warehouses and plants. We developed a mixed integer programming model for the problem and solved it by a heuristic procedure which contains 2 sub-procedures. We used harmony-search meta-heuristic as the main procedure and linear programming to solve a transshipment problem as a subroutine at any iteration of the main procedure.
Key words: Distribution network design, harmony search, mixed integer programming, supply chain management, transshipment problem.