The Effect of Various Parameters of Solution Methodology on a Flexible Integrated Supply Chain Model

Abstract

A successful supply chain must be able to operate at the lowest cost while providing the best customer service as well as environmental protection. As industrial players are under pressure but mostly unprepared to take back products after their usage, logistics network design becomes an even more important issue. To allow for a maximum of flexibility and efficiency, we consider an integrated design of the forward/reverse logistics network using full delivery graph. We apply a Memetic Algorithm with a novel population generation to find a near optimal solution for large size problems. The effect of different parameters on the behavior of the proposed Metaheuristic Algorithm is investigated. Using the experimental work to find the best parameters for this problem is the outlook of these researches.

Taguchi Analysis for Improving Optimization of Integrated Forward/Reverse Logistics

“…According to the obtained results presented in [42], we realized that all the proposed parameters are important and needed to be investigated further. Since we are dealing with a strategic problem, there is no time limitation.…”

“…According to a comprehensive review [40][41][42], there are four independence factors that need to be investigated regarding the proposed algorithm. These factors are population size, crossover rate, local search iteration and number of iteration.…”

“…These factors are population size, crossover rate, local search iteration and number of iteration. As all of these factors have a noticeable effect on the results of the proposed model, it is important to assess all for the efficiency criterion [42]. Three different levels for each factor are considered according to the information presented in Table 7.…”

“…For crossover for sure, it should be in the range of [0, 1], and we considered 0.3, 0.5 and 0.7 to cover low rate, medium rate and high rate. For local search iteration and also number of iteration according to a comprehensive experimental research, we realized that 80 percent of progress happen in the bound we considered for the parameters [42].…”

Improved Simulated Annealing Based Network Model for E-Recycling Reverse Logistics Decisions under Uncertainty

“…The design of an RLN must follow from the forward logistics network (FLN) [6][7][8], which is a "system whose constituent parts include material suppliers, production facilities, distribution services and customers linked together by feed forward flow of materials and feedback flow of information" [9]. By convention in logistics, the nodes that perform the roles of collection and inspection in RLN may also undertake the function of distribution in FLN [4,10].…”