Title: An integrated multi-plant aggregate production-distribution plan generated using memetic algorithm

Authors: P. Ashoka Varthanan, N. Murugan, G. Mohan Kumar

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore-641008, Tamilnadu, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, Coimbatore-641014, Tamilnadu, India. ' Park College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore-641659, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: Many industries adopt multi-site manufacturing in order to reduce their distribution expenses. Such industries allocate the forecasted demand from various customers/demand centres to their respective plants based on gross production, inventory holding and distribution costs. But demand allocation by considering the gross production cost will not be appropriate as production in each plant can be carried out through regular, overtime and outsourcing means. Also, this will lead to allocation of the lion|s share of demand to a plant whose regular time production cost is cheaper than the other plants. But overtime/outsourced production cost may be costlier than the regular time production cost of other plants. In this paper, an aggregate production-distribution plan, considering all the above mentioned costs, is developed for a renowned bearing manufacturing industry in India. The proposed integer non-linear programming model is solved using memetic algorithm (MA), a hybrid form of genetic algorithm (GA) which uses simulated annealing (SA) for local search. The results obtained using MA, GA and SA are compared with the solution generated using LINGO 8.0, one of the popular operations research software.

Keywords: demand forecasting; aggregate planning; production-distribution planning; memetic algorithms; genetic algorithms; simulated annealing; integer nonlinear programming; INLP; operations research; multi-site manufacturing; bearing manufacture; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVCM.2010.033613

International Journal of Value Chain Management, 2010 Vol.4 No.3, pp.213 - 239

Published online: 08 Jun 2010 *

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