A Hybrid Immune Genetic Algorithm Approach to Optimize the Integrated Forward/Reverse Logistics Network for 3PLs

In today´s fiercely competing market environment, a growing number of companies have begun to realize the importance of implementing an integrated logistics management. Thus, hire party logistics service providers (3PLs) must improve their logistics networks to support such integrated supply chain management incorporating forward and reverse logistics flows. This paper presents a mixed integer nonlinear programming model to optimize the integrated logistics network for 3PLs. It is a NP hard problem. Therefore, we propose a hybrid immune genetic algorithm (IGA) based heuristic containing a simplex algorithm as a sub-search process. The numerical results obtained from the proposed method are compared with the outcomes gained by a common hybrid genetic algorithm(GA).The result of the comparison indicates that the performance of the proposed IGA is much better than the common GA.