Integrated bacteria foraging algorithm for cellular manufacturing in supply chain considering facility transfer and production planning

This paper presents an integrated model of facility transfer and production planning in dynamic cellular manufacturing based supply chain. On one hand, transferring facilities to the factory with large orders can facilitate the distribution of products to the local customer zone and responds to the order demand rapidly but will generate transfer cost. Moreover, when many sets of facilities are transferred to certain factory where a lot of product types are produced, the selection of supplier(s) with low material cost will become difficult from the viewpoint of the entire supply chain. On the other hand, due to the limited production capacity and the dynamic of market demands, late delivery or production in advance is often applied during each period. This method will result in backorder cost or holding cost of inventory although it can smooth the production loads. To minimize the total operation cost, we propose a novel integrated bacteria foraging algorithm (IBFA) embedding a five-phase based heuristic (FPBH). The experiment is conducted to verify the performances of the IBFA, modified bacteria evolution operators and the FPBH. The computational results indicate that: (1) with the modified operators and the FPBH, the IBFA performs better than without them, and (2) the IBFA often outperforms the heuristic based genetic algorithm and heuristic based simulated annealing within the same runtime.