Forward supply Chain network design problem: Heuristic approaches

Determining positions and counting of actors, amount of product flowbetween and decreasing transportation costs are handled as a networkdesign problem in supply chain management. Supply chain networkdesign (SCND) problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems. It hastherefore appealed to a number of researchers’ close attention.However, existing literature lacks of common benchmark instances forforward SCND problems so as to make a fair comparison betweendeveloped and applied heuristic approaches. To this end, 450 newbenchmark instances ranging from small to large size for forward SCNDproblems with two, three and four-echelon are generated and amathematical model for each of the problems is formulated. Due to thecomplexity issues, we develop two heuristic solution approaches, geneticalgorithm (GA) and hybrid heuristic algorithm (HHA), and we applythem to the large pool of benchmark instances. Comparativeexperiments show that both the GA and HHA can yield feasible solutionsin much less computational time and, in particular, outperforms CPLEXregarding the solution quality as the number of echelon grows.