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Top1. Introduction
Due to the highly competitive and continuously changing markets, companies have to evolve introducing traceability systems as a response to the internal and external forces of the environment (Bougdira et al., 2020; Millard et al., 2015; Barge et al., 2014; Sahin et al., 2002). The traceability systems have a potential impact on all the enterprise systems (manufacturing, information, decision, etc.). So, when designing and making evolve these systems, it is required to integrate them properly in a given context, in order to enabling them to contribute to the enterprise performance (Haleem et al., 2019; Olibeirav et al., 2019 ; Dai et al., 2015; Miller et al., 2014; Xu, 2010; Papper et al., 2002).
The traceability system establishes precisely the history of composition and location of products all along the supply chain (Sameer, 2011; Regattieri et al., 2007). But such a system does not decrease the amount of products recalled in case of production batch mixing. The problem under study tries to control the mixing of production batches in order to limit the size, and consequently the cost and the media impact of batches recalled in the case of the problem. (Dupuy et al., 2005) proposes a mathematical model for sausage manufacturing in a French food company. This sausage company provides 3-level disassembling and assembling bill of material. It aims to reduce batch dispersion in order to optimize traceability. It is a NP-hard problem (Tamayo et al., 2009).
Our aim in this paper is to develop an efficient hybrid metaheuristic having a simple structure and generating high-quality solutions: The Record to Record Travel-Artificial Bee Colony (RRT-ABC) metaheuristic. This RRT-ABC starts by applying the standard Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) metaheuristic and then the onlooker research phase is ameliorated by applying a local research method (the Record to Record Travel (RRT) method). The proposed hybrid method RRT-ABC ensures good balance between the diversification and the intensification phases.
To improve the performance of the Artificial Bee Colony metaheuristic (ABC) for solving the problem of batch dispersion, we have applied the hybridization of this method with an approximate local search method which is the Record to Record Travel (RRT).
Through this article, we propose a hybrid RRT-ABC method to minimize the quantity of recalled products in the case of a particular nomenclature with three levels of raw materials disassembled in assembled components and into final products. Our new hybrid method has been applied for the problem of batch dispersion, encountered in the sausage process as proposed by (Dupuy, 2004).
To illustrate our work and prove the performance of this method, tests and comparative analyses of this new method are carried out.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we present the state of the art of the manufacturing batch dispersion problem as well as the RRT and the ABC metaheuristics. Then in section 3, we describe our research methodology. Computational results, discussion and convergence behaviour of the proposed RRT-ABC are reported and analysed in section 4. Section 5 concludes the paper and suggests future research directions for our new method application of our new method RRT-ABC.