Evolutionary program for optimal design of material distribution system

In this paper we discuss the optimal design problem of material distribution system which consists of customers and a number of inventory centers to be located. We formulate this problem as a mixed integer programming model and propose an evolutionary program method which absorbs ideas of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Evolutionary Strategy (ES) as well as traditional techniques to solve it. Compared with the alternative location-allocation heuristic method, this evolutionary program method is more promising in finding better solution which can be regarded as near global solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the evolutionary program method by numerical experiments