Concrete Delivery using a combination of GA and ACO

The timely production and distribution of rapidly perishable goods such as concrete is a complex combinatorial optimization problem in the context of supply chain management. The problem involves several tightly interrelated scheduling and routing problems that have to be solved considering a trade-off of production and delivery costs. A hybrid meta-heuristic method combining genetic algorithms with constructive heuristics has been previously presented. This paper introduces a novel approach, by replacing the constructive heuristic with another meta-heuristic, the ant colony optimization approach. The simulation examples show that the concrete supply chain improves the performance with the novel GA-ACO algorithm.