A Modified PSO to Optimize Manufacturers Production and Delivery

This paper presents a new approach to the solution of optimal Manufacturers Production and Delivery (MPD) scheduling problem, using improved particle swarm optimization (ISAPSO) technique. The producing and delivery system is highly complex and possesses nonlinear relationship of the problem variables, products storage, products transport delay and scheduling time linkage that make the problem of finding global optimum difficult using standard optimization methods. In this paper an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is suggested that deals with an inequality constraint treatment mechanism to accelerate the optimization process and simultaneously, the inherent basics of conventional PSO algorithm is preserved. To show its efficiency and robustness, the proposed ISAPSO is applied on the quick response (QR) manufacturing supply chain system using making to order (MTO) strategy. Numerical results are compared with those obtained by PSO and ISAPSO approaches. The simulation results reveal that the proposed ISAPSO appears to be the best in terms of convergence speed, solution time and minimum cost to the MPD problems.