Fuzzy goal programming for inventory management: A bacterial foraging approach

An efficient inventory planning approach in today's global trading regime is necessary not only for increasing the profit margin, but also to maintain system flexibility for achieving higher customer satisfaction. Such an approach should hence be comprised of a prudent inventory policy and clear satisfaction of stakeholder's goals. Relative significance given to various objectives in a supply chain network varies with product as well as time. In this paper, a model is proposed to fill this void for a single product inventory control of a supply chain consisting of three echelons. A generic modification proposed to the membership functions of the fuzzy goal-programming approach is used to mathematically map the aspiration levels of the decision maker. The bacterial foraging algorithm has been modified with enhancement of the algorithms' capability to map integer solution spaces and utilised to solve resulting fuzzy multi-objective function. An illustrative example comprehensively covers various decision scenarios and highlights the underlying managerial insights.