Article ID: | iaor201530300 |
Volume: | 18 |
Issue: | 11 |
Start Page Number: | 150 |
End Page Number: | 167 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2015 |
Journal: | Discrete Optimization |
Authors: | Hosseini S Ahmad |
Keywords: | supply & supply chains, programming: dynamic, programming: mathematical, heuristics, combinatorial optimization |
We consider the uncertain least cost shipping problem. The input is a multi‐item supply chain network with time‐evolving uncertain costs and capacities. Exploiting the operational law of uncertainty theory, a mathematical model of the problem is established and the indeterminacy factors are tackled. We use the scaling idea together with transformation approach and uncertainty programming to develop a hybrid algorithm to optimize and obtain the uncertainty distribution of the total shipping cost. We analyze the practical performance of the algorithm and present an illustrative example.