Multi-objective integrated production distribution planning concerning manufacturing partners

The issue of integrated production and distribution planning has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. Companies, facing competitive markets, have shown considerable attention for sharing with their manufacturing partners, to better satisfy market needs and to maintain their higher level of productivity. Based on such trends, this paper considers a bi-objective optimisation for Integrated Production and Distribution Planning in the presence of Manufacturing Partners (IPDP-MP). The first objective is to minimise the total cost, which includes production, purchase from partners, inventory holding, transportation and distribution costs. The second objective is to maximise the quality level of products supplied by the partners within the planning horizon. LINGO optimisation software has been used to solve the model, but since the problem is of NP-hard category, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) and Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation (MOPSO) have also been developed as two metaheuristic solution algorithms. Comparing with the results from LINGO, these algorithms have been evaluated using small-scale problems. The two algorithms have also been compared with each other considering problems of various scales. These evaluations have confirmed suitability and practicality of the two proposed algorithms, while MOPSO algorithm has shown better results in most cases.