Supplier selection in make-to-order flowshop manufacturing: simulated annealing approach

Concept of supply chain (SC) planning in tactical and operational levels of supply chain often falls in the production planning. In SCM, the manufacturer echelon is set betweensuppliers from one side and distributors from the other side, while sometime is directly connected to the customer (such assupply chain of Dell Company). In spite of many studies, considering and optimizing usual sequencing problems in flowshop production center as a part of supply chain, where purchasing plan should be made and covering customer demand with the least tardiness is quite scarce. For this purpose, a new Mixed-Integer Non Linear Programming (MINLP) model of the described problem is presented. Since such problems categorizedin NP-hard class, a fast metaheuristic method, i.e. Simulating Annealing (SA), with useful neighborhood search mechanism are developed. Parameters of algorithms are calibrated by means of Taguchi design of experiment. Obtained results compared to LINGO 8.0 software in different sizes of test problems. Numerical result illustrates the great efficiency of algorithm against exact solver, in two quality criterions, solution quality and computation run time. Also, results show a high quality performance in robustness of algorithm