Optimal Design of Agri-Food Chain Network: An Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

The optimal design of agri-food supply chain network (ASCN) is critical to reduce the sum of production cost and transportation cost. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is presented to handle facility location and production capacity selection as well as choice of transportation mode for ASCN design (ASCND) problem. Due to the complexity of the design problem for the multi-echelon and multi-product ASCN, an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach is proposed. For binary decision variables, local search within the neighborhood of best solution is embedded into PSO to enhance the exportability. Given binary variables, LINGO is adapted to solve the linear programming problem derived from the MIP. Case study illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed improved PSO approach. The computational results of case study further show that improved PSO is superior to original binary PSO for ASCND problem.