Title: A review of evolutionary algorithms for multi objective multi product multi modal distribution problem with a possible new approach

Authors: P. Parthiban, P. Venkateswara Reddy, S. Arunachalam

Addresses: Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli 620 015, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jawaharlal Nehru Techological University Hyderabad, Kukatpally, Hyderabad – 500085, Andra Pradesh, India. ' School of Computing, IT and Engineering, University of East London, London E16 2RD, UK

Abstract: Transportation industry is a fairly large industry in today|s globalised world, and has significant effect too. Each and every big or small industry is bound to use the transportation facilities or logistics. The main problems in this logistics operation are optimising the cost, time, distance travelled, back orders and surpluses. In most of the studies, one or two of the aspects mentioned above has been taken into consideration and solved accordingly. Again in a lot of studies, it was assumed that the demand structure, inventory structure, structure of cluster formation and structure of route formation are of deterministic nature. This study is reviewing the previous attempts to solve different aspects of distribution problems, and simultaneously proposing alternative way of attempts.

Keywords: evolutionary algorithms; transportation facilities; multi-objective distribution; multi-product distribution; multi-modal distribution; costs; time optimisation; distance travelled; back orders; surpluses; demand structure; inventories; cluster formation; route formation; routes; deterministic attributes; logistics management; economics; globalisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLEG.2011.041422

International Journal of Logistics Economics and Globalisation, 2011 Vol.3 No.1, pp.1 - 16

Published online: 29 Nov 2014 *

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