The supermarket sector is one of the most important components of the retail industry. Rapidly growing chain supermarkets stand out in this sector. This study introduces a hybrid method to assess the performance of stores within a supermarket chain. In the study, stores are compared over a five-year period using various criteria. These criteria include financial metrics such as rent cost, employee cost, energy cost, waste cost, supply cost, and sales revenue, as well as store size. Initially, the presence of differences between supermarkets based on these criteria was investigated. According to the criterion-based analysis, it is not easy to make a decision about the overall performance of supermarkets. Therefore, conducting the analysis using multi-criteria decision-making methods provides more meaningful results. In the proposed hybrid method, the criteria are first weighted using the entropy method to determine their importance levels. It was determined that the most important criterion is rent cost. The performance was then calculated using the VIKOR, MOORA, and ARAS methods. As a result of the analysis, the same store showed the best performance in all three methods.

With increase in differentiation and decreasing batch size of products, feeding the assembly line at regular intervals is considered to be a critical problem in today’s manufacturing sector. Yet no clear solution has been developed for this problem; therefore, the main focus of this research is to discuss the different aspects of line feeding, the latest trend in literature, and to propose an innovative method to support solving the problem. A discrete event simulation model is developed and a mathematical model based on particle swarm optimization is used to support the simulation. The hybrid model is finally applied to practical situations. Results show how different settings of kanban influence the performance of the assembly line feeding system. The biggest novelty item is certainly the recognition of the trade-off between kanban size and number of kanban and the importance of investigating its behaviour during the design of the system.