Search

In this paper we address the joint problem of minimising both the transport and inventory costs of a retail chain that is supplied from a central warehouse. We propose a hybrid evolutionary algorithm where the delivery patterns are evolved for each shop, while the delivery routes are obtained employing the multistart sweep algorithm. The experiments performed show that this method can obtain acceptable results consistently and within a reasonable timescale. The results are also of a lower cost than those obtained by other strategies employed in previous research. Furthermore, they confirm the interest of addressing the optimisation problem jointly, rather than minimising separately inventory and transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]