TS and ACO in Hybrid Approach for Product Distribution Problem

Introduction

Today’s companies are facing fundamental challenges, namely technological change and increased competition as well as the demands of the market. Customer requirements have become more and more unpredictable. Additionally, the challenge of competitiveness has been becoming greater and greater for companies: In this case, companies seek to stabilize and increase their market shares and make acceptable profits in a demanding environment. To do this, companies must be able to thrive in this environment and meet demand to satisfy their customers, given that the objective of all companies is to deliver products to their customers with the requested quality. Consequently, logistics have increasingly become an essential function for companies. Indeed, it is the knowledge and mastery of logistics that will determine companies’ performance.

Logistics are not limited to the organization of transport, raw materials, and goods. They are actually a management control technique, the flow of raw materials and product from their sources of supply to their consumption point. Moreover, several actors have said that the logistic chain appeared by following an evolution that includes industrial logistics: the purchase of raw materials, transport, etc., storage logistics: the transport of finished products and their warehousing, and distribution logistics: the transport of orders to the distribution point, storage, and inventory management in the retail store. The proposed approach in this article is to optimize logistic distribution (the product transport component).

Through this evolution of logistics, we have seen that physical distribution represents the most important part of logistic expenses. In fact, distribution logistics can be defined as a structure formed by the partners involved in the competitive exchange process to make goods and services available to consumers, users, intermediaries, or buyers.

One of the most obvious manifestations of logistic activity is the growth of freight transportation due to the expansion of world trade. The globalization of the industry, including planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and marketing, has resulted in increased trade complexity and the development of transportation networks.

Successful businesses are also those with efficient logistics. Transportation can represent a significant percentage of logistics. Companies always seek to minimize the cost of getting goods from origins to destination while respecting all the constraints, where each researcher offers a solution to this problem. As a result, optimizing transport costs has become a key factor in the success of any business.

The problems of localization, planning, scheduling, and transport are generally NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) problems; their algorithmic complexity is an important problem for a very large number of researchers. However, in an increasingly competitive industrial context, companies are asking for decision support tools capable of integrating a global vision of their organization.

Hybrid techniques based on meta-heuristics are particularly suited to the characteristics of logistics systems.

In this contribution, the authors are interested in the problem linked to the optimization of transport within a company transport network and in proposing a hybrid approach (TS, ACO) to ensure that the production transport to the destinations is well received in order to satisfy customer requests.

The main objective of this study is to provide companies with efficient use of transport to increase their returns. As a result, several questions are required:

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  How can the best path to take be properly determined?

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  How can the distances travelled be minimized?

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  How should we proceed to reduce transport costs?

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  How can the productivity of companies be increased by optimizing the product distribution process (transport component)?

This article is organized as follows: the first section presents an introduction to the concept of this study, and the second section reviews some related work, followed by the positioning of the proposed approach. The third section provides the details of the hybridization proposed in this article. The fourth section presents the obtained results, which are followed by a comparative study. The last section presents a conclusion and some perspectives.