Evolutionary algorithms for solving the multi-location and multi-item transshipment problem

Transshipment is items transfer between locations belonging to the same echelon level. It is adopted to improve inventory systems performance measures. It consists to derive the optimal replenishment decision variables while a transshipment policy is practiced. A huge body of works has addressed this topic where several configurations are considered and many approaches are adopted. A few of them has interested in the multi-item and multi-location configuration because of its complexity. We focused in this paper on this complex configuration and we propose two evolutionary algorithms PSO and DE to resolve the studied problem and we compare between them. Also, we study the impact of a number of problem parameters on the inventory system performance measures.