An Improved Physarum Solver for Supply Chain Network with Fuzzy Numbers
Yongchuan Tang, Deyun Zhou and Shuai Xu
An improved Physarum-inspired model is proposed for solving a fuzzy supply chain network problem. To minimize the overall cost of a complex supply chain network, supply chain network is firstly transformed into a user equilibrium problem. Then, to address uncertainty along the link, the cost of each link is modelled as a fuzzy number. The original Physarum model is modified to obtain the flux of each link under fuzzy link cost condition. Compared with other Physarum-inspired methods, the proposed method can deal with fuzzy link cost in supply chain networks, which is a common circumstance in real applications. The experiment results of the numerical example demonstrate the convergence, feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Keywords: Physarum; complex networks; supply chain network; fuzzy number; fuzzy link cost