A new Approach based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to Determine the Supply Chain (SC) Design for a Product Mix

Abstract—Manufacturing supply chain(SC) faces changing business environment and various customer demands. Pareto Ant Colony Optimisation (P-ACO) in order to obtain the non-dominated set of different SC designs was utilized as the guidance for designing manufacturing SC. P-ACO explores the solution space on the basis of applying the Ant Colony Optimisation algorithm and implementing more than one pheromone matrix, one for every objective. The SC design problem has been addressed by using Pareto Ant Colony Optimisation in which two objectives are minimised simultaneously. There were tested two ways in which the quantity of pheromones in the PM is incremented. In the SPM, the pheromone increment is a function of the two objectives, cost and time, while in MPM the pheromone matrix is divided into two pheromones, on