Heuristic, meta-heuristic and hyper-heuristic approaches for fresh produce inventory control and shelf space allocation

Abstract

The allocation of fresh produce to shelf space represents a new decision support research area which is motivated by the desire of many retailers to improve their service due to the increasing demand for fresh food. However, automated decision making for fresh produce allocation is challenging because of the very short lifetime of fresh products. This paper considers a recently proposed practical model for the problem which is motivated by our collaboration with Tesco. Moreover, the paper investigates heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches as alternatives for the generalized reduced gradient algorithm, which becomes inefficient when the problem size becomes larger. A simpler single-item inventory problem is firstly studied and solved by a polynomial time bounded procedure. Several dynamic greedy heuristics are then developed for the multi-item problem based on the procedure for the single-item inventory problem. Experimental results show that these greedy heuristics are much more efficient and provide competitive results when compared to those of a multi-start generalized reduced gradient algorithm. In order to further improve the solution, we investigated simulated annealing, a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure and three types of hyper-heuristics. Their performance is tested and compared on a set of problem instances which are made publicly available for the research community.

Keywords:

• meta-heuristics
• hyper-heuristics
• shelf space allocation
• inventory
• fresh produce

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous referees and the editor for their helpful comments. We are also grateful for the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grants GR/R60577/01 and GR/S70197/01.