Multi-objective inventory control using electromagnetism-like meta-heuristic

Abstract

Most of the works on multi-objective inventory control unify the various objectives into a single objective such that lead to a compromise solution whose non-dominance is not guaranteed. This paper presents an algorithm based on Electromagnetism-like Mechanism (EM) to solve a multi-objective inventory control problem with cost and shortage minimization objectives. EM is a new meta-heuristic originated from the electromagnetism theory in physics; it simulates attraction and repulsion of charged particles in order to move towards the optimum. A framework, so called Multi-Objective EM (MOEM), is proposed to approximate the well-known efficient solutions of order size and safety stock without using any surrogate measure (e.g. service level or shortage cost) and prior preference information from decision-makers. To give a specific compromise solution, any outranking method can be implemented to prioritize the non-dominated solutions for decision-makers. Finally, this could be the first attempt to apply EM to multi-objective inventory control, even the inventory control problems.

Keywords:

• Multi-objective optimization
• Electromagnetism-like mechanism
• Inventory control

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express our appreciation to the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions, which greatly enhanced the clarity of this article. All of their suggestions are incorporated directly in the text.