Artificial immune system and sheep flock algorithms for two-stage fixed-charge transportation problem

Abstract

In this paper, we cope with a two-stage distribution planning problem of supply chain regarding fixed charges. The focus of the paper is on developing efficient solution methodologies of the selected NP-hard problem. Based on computational limitations, common exact and approximation solution approaches are unable to solve real-world instances of such NP-hard problems in a reasonable time. These approaches involve cumbersome computational steps in real-size cases. In order to solve the mixed integer linear programming model, we develop an artificial immune system and a sheep flock algorithm to achieve better solutions in comparison to earlier approaches. The evaluations are set up based on tw..