Applying the fuzzy ART algorithm to distribution network design

Distribution network design is an important issue in supply chain management and plays an important role in making new market development. Because of JIT philosophy, most of managers now have focused on designing appropriate distribution networks. Thus, categorizing distributors and selecting the best ones are crucial for companies. This paper provides a new method to categorize and select distributors. The fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) algorithm is utilized to categorize distributors according to their similarity. To improve the performance of the algorithm, we train the algorithm using the past data. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to examine the validity of the proposed algorithm.