Rasul Jamshidi
S.M.T Fatemi Qomi
Behruz Karimi

In a supply chain many efforts such as upgrading the servicing facilities, and decreasing the product delivery time could be made inorder to establish a good image and to enhance customer’s loyalty. Naturally, an extra-added cost must be spent for these efforts and it is expected to have a result to reduce the shortage cost of backorder and the total expected annual cost. In this paper we consider a five tierssupply chain andassume that the manufacturers’lead time and warehouses’lead time can be shortened at an extra crashing cost. For product transportation from one facility to another facility, different types of option could be used andthese options have variety in price. Also each facilitie has a capacity constraint to provide demand of lower tier of supply chain. In this paper we formulated an integer programming model fora five tiers supply chain with controllable lead time and multiple transportation options with capacity constraint.We develop a novel meta heuristic solution method that combines the Taguchi’s feature with Memetic algorithm in order to solve the proposed model. The performance of the proposed solution method has been examined against a set of numeric instances and results indicate that this method canprovide better results than the previous solutionseffectively.

Supply chain, Taguchi, Controllable lead time, Memetic algorithm, Optimization