Applications of Jga to Operations Management and Vehicle Routing

Two of the most complex activities in production and operations management (POM) are inventory planning and operations scheduling. This chapter presents two problems related to these activities, namely, the capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem and the capacitated vehicle routing problem. For each of these problems, the authors discuss several solution methods, present a competitive genetic algorithm, and describe its implementation in the Java Genetic Algorithm (JGA) framework. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how to use JGA to model and solve complex business problems arising in POM. The authors show that JGAbased solutions are quite competitive and easier to implement than widely used methods found in the literature.