Design of a multi-stage transportation network in a supply chain system: Formulation and ecient solution procedure

Nowadays, supply chain management (scm) is an interesting problem thathas attracted the attention of many researchers. transportation network design is oneof the most important elds of scm. in this paper, an integrated multi-stage and multiproductlogistic network design including forward and reverse logistic is considered. atrst, a mixed integer nonlinear programming model (minlp) is formulated in such away as to minimize purchasing and transportation costs. then, a hybrid priority-basedgenetic algorithm (pb-ga), and simulated annealing algorithm (sa) are developed intwo phases to nd the proper solutions. the solution is represented by a matrix and avector. response surface methodology (rsm) is used in order to tune the signicantparameters of the algorithm. several test problems are generated in order to examine theproposed meta-heuristic algorithm performance.