Water cycle and artificial bee colony based algorithms for optimal order allocation problem with mixed quantity discount scheme

Abstract

Supplier selection is one of the most important activities in purchasing management. Once the suppliers are determined, the proper allocation of the order among the suppliers can greatly help the company to reduce the raw material and production costs. In this paper, the order allocation with quantity discount of a single product is considered. The product can be offered with either an all unit discount model or an incremental discount one. Since the problem is NP-hard, three metaheuristics are applied to solve the problem. The metaheuristics are water cycle algorithm, artificial bee colony algorithm and hybrid water cycle-artificial bee colony algorithm. The results obtained from these algorithms are then compared.