When making a batch production decision for a buyer-vendor coordination system, the management must simultaneously consider the operating expenses incurred in in-house manufacturing and inventory, finished goods’ shipping, and stock holding at the retailer end. Achieving the operational goals of desirable quality, minimal production disruption, and shortening fabrication time help minimize overall in-house operating costs and maximize customer satisfaction. This work builds an operating cost minimization model for buyer-vendor coordination batch system with scrap, breakdowns, overtime, multi-shipment, and an external source to assist the management in optimizing their production-delivery plan. Removing inevitable scrap items ensures product quality, and correction action on stochastic equipment breakdown prevents unacceptable production delays. Implementing partial overtime and adopting an external source expedites in-house manufacturing time. Model construction and cost analysis enable us to decide the operating expense function. Then, we verify the function’s convexity and decide our model’s best manufacturing runtime with the differential calculus and a proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the numerical demonstrations are used to exhibit our work’s applicability and show what kinds of crucial in-depth information can be disclosed and made accessible to the production planners for their decision-making.

The planning of charging infrastructure is crucial to developing electric vehicles. Planning for charging stations requires considering several variables, including building costs, charging demand, and coverage levels. It might be advantageous to use a multi-objective optimization method based on the NSGA-II. We need to address the current problems in choosing the location of electric vehicle charging stations. Firstly, urban land use is divided into five functional areas, and the TF-IDF algorithm is applied to the division of functional areas. A combined clustering algorithm is proposed to cluster POIs in functional areas into several clusters and determine the cluster centers as charging demand points. We Analyze charging practices and travel patterns of electric car users, fit the charging likelihood of various functional regions, and calculate the charging demand of each charging demand point in the study area. Introduce the NSGA-II algorithm and consider the charging station's progressive coverage to fit the actual area covered by the charging station.Taking the maximization of system benefits and the maximization of the minimum coverage level as the optimization objectives to carry out multi-objective optimization. Finally, we take the charging station planning in the urban area of Hohhot as an example and provide different site selection planning schemes. The planning schemes for different numbers of charging stations are analyzed to obtain a charging station planning scheme that takes into account both objectives.

Timely and cost-effective supply of spare parts is the main purpose of spare parts inventory management and substitution is an effective way to fulfill demand on time. However, direct substitution of spare parts is not suitable for the high-tech industries due to the ever-changing nature of the product structures. Hence, parts should be transformed to be used as substitutes. This paper provides a novel spare parts inventory control model for the high-tech industries. In the proposed model, part transformation-based substitution is considered and the near-optimal values of spare part inventory levels (s, S) that minimize total cost are determined by using a simulated annealing-based simulation optimization approach. Computational analyses are performed for a hypothetical inventory system by considering transformation and no-transformation cases. The results reveal that transformation is very useful for the companies who endure long production lead times and high penalty costs associated with backorders.

From the perspective of carbon quota policy, we consider integrating carbon quota sharing contracts into the collaborative decision-making model of the photovoltaic industry chain and compare and explore the collaborative decision-making of the photovoltaic industry chain under decentralized decision-making and considering carbon quota sharing contracts. Research has found that carbon quota sharing contracts can effectively promote green innovation among the main body of the photovoltaic industry chain; In the case of carbon quota sharing contracts, the pricing between photovoltaic system suppliers and photovoltaic power plant enterprises is lower; Under the carbon quota sharing contract, the profits, and overall profits of each entity in the photovoltaic industry chain are better than the optimal profits under decentralized conditions.

Efficiency in logistics is often affected by the fair distribution of the customers along the routes and the available depots for goods delivery. From this perspective, in this study, the Multi-depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP), by considering two objectives, is addressed. The two objectives in conflict for MDVRP are the distance traveled by vehicles and the standard deviation of the routes’ length. A significant standard deviation value provides a small distance traveled by vehicles, translated into unbalanced routes. We have used a weighted average objective function involving the two objectives. A Variable Neighborhood Search algorithm within a Chu-Beasley Genetic Algorithm has been proposed to solve the problem. For decision-making purposes, several values are chosen for the weight factors multiplying the terms at the objective function to build up a non-dominated front of solutions. The methodology is tested in large-size instances for the MDVRP, reporting noticeable results for managerial insights.

As the simple assembly line balancing problem type 1 (SALBP1) has been proven to be NP-hard, heuristic and metaheuristic approaches are widely used for solving middle to large instances. Nevertheless, the characteristics (fitness landscape) of the problem’s search space have not been studied so far and no rigorous justification for implementing various metaheuristic methods has been presented. Aiming to fill this gap in the literature, this study presents the first comprehensive and in-depth Fitness Landscape Analysis (FLA) study for SALBP1. The FLA was performed by generating a population of 1000 random solutions and improving them to local optimal solution, and then measuring various statistical indices such as average distance, gap, entropy, amplitude, length of the walk, autocorrelation, and fitness-distance among all solutions, to understand the complexity, structure, and topology of the solution space. We solved 83 benchmark problems with various cycle times taken from Scholl’s dataset which required 83000 local searches from initial to optimal solutions. The analysis showed that locally optimal assembly line balances in SALBP1 are distributed nearly uniformly in the landscape of the problem, and the small average difference between the amplitudes of the initial and optimal solutions implies that the landscape was almost plain. In addition, the large average gap between local and global solutions showed that global optimum solutions in SALBP1 are difficult to find, but the problem can be effectively solved using a single-solution-based metaheuristic to near-optimality. In addition to the FLA, a new mathematical formulation for the entropy (diversity) of solutions in the search space for SALBP1 is also presented in this paper.

In this paper, an electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and under travel time uncertainty (U-EVRW) is addressed. The U-EVRW aims to find the optimal proactive routing plan of the electric vehicles under the travel time uncertainty during the route of the vehicles which is rarely studied in the literature. Furthermore, customer time windows, limited loading capacities and limited battery capacities constraints are also incorporated. A new mixed integer programming (MIP) model is formulated for the proposed U-EVRW. In addition to the commercial CPLEX Optimizer version 20.1.0, a modified Clustering Search based Genetic algorithm (MCSGA) is developed as a solution method. Numerical tests are conducted on the one hand to validate the effectiveness of the proposed MCSGA and on the other hand to analyze the impact of travel time uncertainty of the electric vehicle on the solutions quality.

A multi-objective dynamic demand split delivery emergency material distribution model is developed to enhance the efficiency of emergency material distribution and facilitate the smooth progress of safety rescue operations during unconventional emergencies. This model incorporates the psychological view of those affected by disasters. The issue of dynamic demand may be transformed into a static demand problem by dividing the distribution time window into time domains of equal length. The optimization process is thereafter executed in real-time with the timed batch methodology. A refined ant colony method has been developed to address the model by integrating the attributes of the mathematical model, followed by doing an arithmetic case analysis. The findings indicate that the algorithm and mathematical model suggested in this study are efficacious in addressing the emergency material distribution issue, offering valuable decision-making advice and reference.

The mixed-model assembly line balancing problem (MMALBP) in multi-demand scenarios is investigated, which addresses demand fluctuations for each product in each scenario. The objective is to minimize the sum of costs associated with tasks allocation, workstation activation, and penalty costs for unbalanced workloads. A mixed integer programming model is developed to consider the constraint of workstation space capacity. A phased heuristic algorithm is designed to solve the problem. The computational results show that considering demand fluctuations in multiple demand scenarios leads to more balanced workstation loads and improved assembly line production efficiency. Finally, sensitivity analysis of important parameters is conducted to summarize the impact of parameter changes on the results and provide practical management insights.

As a supply chain integrator, a fourth party logistics (4PL) typically does not have its own logistics facilities, so the 4PL needs to match third party logistics (3PLs) and customers to meet customers' logistics service demands. An effective matching method can not only improve the efficiency of 4PL supply chain management, but also establish more long-term and stable cooperative relationships with customers and 3PLs. Therefore, we propose a novel two-sided logistics matching method considering the trading psychology and matching effort of matching subjects under the 4PL. First, based on considering the trading psychology, the concepts of blocking pair and stable matching are redefined. Then, based on the public values and matching effort of customers and 3PLs, the evaluation values of customers and 3PLs are calculated. And the trading possibilities of customers and 3PLs are calculated by considering the fairness threshold. Next, we consider different stable matching demands of customers and 3PLs and develop a bi-objective matching model to maximize the trading possibilities of both customers and 3PLs. Furthermore, the properties of the proposed method are discussed. Finally, a numerical example and comparison analysis are provided to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.