Towards a Decision Support System for Optimizing the Location of Warehouses in a Supply Chain by Using the Bee Colony Algorithm

Abstract

One of the goals that a company sets is the customer's satisfaction, which is a priority item. This clearly shows that the concerns of companies are focused on the customer and how this later could be served quickly. This work addresses the problem of optimization of the location of the distribution centers of a final product to customers, in a given region. The problem addressed in this paper is the location of the position (emplacement) to build a new distribution center (warehouses), taking into account the constraint of the distance between a distribution center and the various points of sale, and the constraint of the cost of land to build a distribution center. The optimization method used for this problem is the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC), which was initially applied to numerical function optimization problems, inspired from the behavioral model bees during foraging.