Bi-objective Build-to-order Supply Chain Problem with Customer Utility

Abstract

Taking into account competitive markets, manufacturers attend more customer’s personalization. Accordingly, build-to-order systems have been given more attention in recent years. In these systems, the customer is a very important asset for us and has been paid less attention in the previous studies. This paper introduces a new build-to-order problem in the supply chain. This study focuses on both manufacturer's profit and customer's utility simultaneously where demand is dependent on customer's utility. The customer's utility is a behavior based upon utility function that depends on quality and price and customer's preferences. The new bi-objective non-linear problem is a multi-period, multi-product and three-echelon supply chain in order to increase manufacturer's profit and customer's utility simultaneously. Solving the complicated problem, two multi-objective meta-heuristics, namely non-dominated ranked genetic algorithm (NRGA) and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), were used to solve the given problem. Finally, the outcomes obtained by these meta-heuristics are analyzed.