Abstract

In recent years, harmony search (HS) algorithms have gained significant attentions for their abilities to solve difficult problems in engineering. This paper introduces the applications of HS in inventory management problems. Four specific inventory problems in certain and uncertain environments are considered: constraint multi-product newsboy problem with fuzzy demand, economic order quantity problem with advanced payment, bi-objective newsboy problem with fuzzy costs and periodic review problem with stochastic period length and dynamic demands. The computational performance of the HS method on solving these four optimization problems will be compared with other meta-heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), and particle swarm optimization (PSO) methods. HS method is shown to achieve the best performance.

Key words: Inventory control, newsboy, economic order quantity, periodic review system, harmony search, stochastic inventory model, fuzzy inventory model.