Meta-Heuristic Approaches for Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) is essentially a set of approaches utilized to efficiently integrate suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, and stores, so that merchandise is produced and distributed at the right quantities, to the right locations, and at the right time in order to minimize system-wide costs or maximize profits while satisfying service level requirements. To solve complex problems in SCM and to obtain optimization, various meta-heuristics algorithms can be used. Thus, this chapter discusses the background of meta-heuristics algorithms. The related work and future research direction for using meta-heuristics approaches for supply chain management are addressed in this chapter.