Article ID: | iaor20041412 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 86 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 35 |
End Page Number: | 45 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2003 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Economics |
Authors: | Min Hokey, Gen Mitsuo, Zhou Gengui |
Keywords: | genetic algorithms, customer care |
In today's customer-centric business environment, a firm's ability to allocate its customers to available warehouses can be translated into a competitive advantage. With its increasing significance, the problem of allocating a set of customers to multiple warehouses has begun to draw attention from practitioners and acedemicians alike. This paper proposes a mathematical model and an efficent solution procedure for the bi-criteria allocation problem involving multiple warehouses with different capacities. The proposed solution procedure utilizes a genetic that is designed to find Pareto optimal solutions for this problem in a short period of time. The application of the proposed model and solution procedure to a real-world problem demonstrates its usefulness and practicality.