The Importance and Applicability of Metaheuristics in Supply Chains

Abstract

The new technologies brought to life by Industry 4.0 have led to the transformation of the digital world and thus supply chains. To continuously improve speed, accuracy, efficiency, and quality, it was necessary to drastically change the information flow and improve the optimization processes. The complex and complicated tasks of supply chains belong to the difficult-to-solve, np-hard complexity class. In many cases, metaheuristics are used to solve these problems, which can provide results much faster than exact methods, but in many cases, they fall short in terms of accuracy. According to the authors, the use of metaheuristics should be treated as part of some kind of trade-off. These algorithms are usually compared to each other, not to a different kind of optimization procedure, and they do not observe the point that can determine which method is the more favorable, more profitable procedure. The authors present the above topic in this chapter, which helps to reveal further research gaps and new research directions.