After a discussion of the methodological proposals for supply chain (SC) design published so far, we describe a hierarchical method consisting of five stages, as well as related concepts and tools. The aim of this method, named SC outline process, is to provide a frame for the decision-making about the SC configuration. This approach is applicable for all types of SCs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft
This paper presents a high performing Discrete Artificial Bee Colony algorithm for the blocking flow shop problem with flow time criterion. To develop the proposed algorithm, we considered four strategies for the food source phase and two strategies for each of the three remaining phases (employed bees, onlookers and scouts). One of the strategies tested in the food source phase and one implemented in the employed bees phase are new. Both have been proved to be very effective for the problem at hand. The initialization scheme named HPF2(λ,µ) in particular, which is used to construct the initial food sources, is shown in the computational evaluation to be one of the main procedures that allow the DABC_RCT to obtain good solutions for this problem. To find the best configuration of the algorithm, we used Design of Experiments (DOE).This technique has been used extensively in the literature to calibrate the parameters of the algorithms but not to select its configuration. Comparing it with other algorithms proposed for this problem in the literature demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the DABC_RCT.
a b s t r a c tWe present some results attained with two variants of Bounded Dynamic Programming algorithm to solve the Fm9block9C max problem using as an experimental data the well-known Taillard instances. We have improved the best known solutions for 17 of Taillard's instances, including the 10 instances from set 12.
We consider the NP-hard problem of scheduling n jobs in F identical parallel flow shops, each consisting of a series of m machines, and doing so with a blocking constraint. The applied criterion is to minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum completion time of all the jobs in F flow shops (lines). The Parallel Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (PFSP) is conceptually similar to another problem known in the literature as the Distributed Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (DPFSP), which allows modeling the scheduling process in companies with more than one factory, each factory with a flow shop configuration. Therefore, the proposed methods can solve the scheduling problem under the blocking constraint in both situations, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been studied previously. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model along with some constructive and improvement heuristics to solve the parallel blocking flow shop problem (PBFSP) and thus minimize the maximum completion time among lines. The proposed constructive procedures use two approaches that are totally different from those proposed in the literature. These methods are used as initial solution procedures of an iterated local search (ILS) and an iterated greedy algorithm (IGA), both of which are combined with a variable neighborhood search (VNS). The proposed constructive procedure and the improved methods take into account the characteristics of the problem. The computational evaluation demonstrates that both of them –especially the IGA– perform considerably better than those algorithms adapted from the DPFSP literature.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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