Solving the bi-objective mix production problem with the possibility of outsourcing using meta-heuristic algorithms

Today in manufacturing units, identifying the products that must be manufactured, production sizes of each product and compliance with the resources are known as substantial issues. Such problem is generally called "Mix Manufacturing". In addition, advanced industrial units do not concentrate on only one product and try to meet the customer's needs as much as possible. Since these days the number and type of customers' needs are in a constant change, despite being advanced the manufacturing unitswould have challenges when producing a diverse range of products. Outsourcing is a proper solution to these challenges for industrial units so as to retain their customers besides monitoring the quality. In this study, we present a mathematical model for the mix production considering outsourcing. Due to the computational complexity of the resulted model, we applied Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA),NSGA − ΙΙ and a hybrid algorithm of GA and PSO to find near optimal solution of the problem. Then the performance of the solutions found by the proposed meta-heuristics is compared with each other, the results implies that despite other methods, ICA has a lower convergence rate.

Keywords:

Mix production , Outsourcing , Meta-heuristic methods.