| Abstract: | The design of a physical distribution system (PDS) involves the determination of the number and locations of distribution centres, estimation of required vehicle numbers and design of vehicle routings. Due to the enormous numbers of possible combinatorial designs of the system, it is difficult to obtain an optimal design in acceptable computation effort on many occasions. In this paper, a new solution framework for the design of PDS by implementing the genetic algorithm (GA) is presented. With the characteristic of simultaneous optimization of a large population of configuration, the proposed methodology has been proved to be an extremely efficient optimizer. In the experimental simulation conducted in this paper, it also indicates this approach can provide a near-optimal solution to the design of PDS. To analyse the growth and decay of many schemas contained in the population, the effects of the operation of reproduction, crossover and mutation on the schema are studied. The simulation evaluation about the system performance and genetic parameters is presented along with the discussions at the end of this paper. |
