Industrial Engineering Journal ›› 2012, Vol. 15 ›› Issue (6): 119-125.

• practice & application • Previous Articles     Next Articles

An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Solving Production-Transportation Lot-Sizing Problem

  

  1. School of Business, Sun Yat-sen University,Guangzhou 510275, China
  • Online:2012-12-31 Published:2013-01-15

Abstract: Aiming at the implementation of joint decision of production and transportation, production-transportation lot-sizing problem is discussed, which is a multi-item-and-multi-period capacitated lot-sizing and transportation problem. This problem is then formulated as a 0-1 mixed integer programming problem. In this model, the transportation cost is decided by the numbers of containers. However, if demands exceed the transportation capacity, it can be outsourced, but with higher freight rate. After analyzing the properties of the model, an improved ant colony algorithm (ANT) is proposed. By this algorithm, different value of pheromone and heuristic information is set as 0-state or 1-state. Then, the 0-1 setup matrix, production matrix, and transportation plan can be obtained accordingly. A numerical example shows that integrated production and transportation can effectively reduce the procurement cost and further reduce the total cost. Comparison with other methods shows that the searching optimization probability of the proposed ANT is 100%, the average evolved generations is 10, the average time is 1 second. The ANT is more stable and better for seeking efficiency than other algorithms.

Key words: dynamic lot sizing, transportation costs, ant colony algorithm