Particle Swarm Optimization to Solve Competitive Production Routing Problem

The production routing problem (PRP) integrates vehicle routing and production planning problems. Generally, in PRPs, the impact of competitors has not been considered. Clearly, in the real world, it is no longer possible to have a monopoly market. In competitive environment, customers choose a supplier based on price and quality. So in this article as a definition of quality, providing quick access to customer needs and availability are determined as the requirements of a competitive environment. Therefore, the production routing problem has been modeled with knowing the earliest and latest time of competitor demand meeting. In this way, In case of delay in supplying customers demand, the market share is lost relative to the amount of delay. The problem is modeled and it has been solved by the GAMS software. Since particle swarm optimization has been successfully applied to a variety of problems, here, to solve the problem for the large-sized instances a particle swarm optimization algorithm is also presented. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the results with small-sized instances were compared with solutions of GAMS.