Inventory Management in Networked Service Systems

Abstract

The globalization of economy and market leaded to in-creased networking in the field of manufacturing and services. The processes of these manufacturing and services including logistics became more and more complex. The design and operation of these complex processes can be described as NP-hard optimization problems. These problems can be solved using sophisticated models and methods using metaheuristics based algorithms. Much of the researches in this area are focusing on manufacturing. This paper aims to report a firefly meta-heuristics based optimization method, by the aid of which it is possible to support the solution of design and control problems of networked ser-vice processes. The authors describe a general model and present a new metrics to measure permutation distances used in the algorithm.