A bi-phase approach for the combined production and distribution problem

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested to the problem of the production distribution planning in supply chain management while minimizing three costs simultaneously such as production setups, inventories and distribution. The complexity of this problem is known to be NP-hard. In order to solve this problem, we propose a bi-phase Variable Neighbourhood Search algorithm (VNS). The computational experiments, according to the instances of the literature, have shown the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm against the existing approaches.