Inventory Space Minimization in Smart Factory by a Designed Grey Wolf Optimizer

With severe global competitions, how to control inventory so as to reduce the material storage space plays a pivotal role in reducing the daily cost resulting from the land rental. The goal of this paper is to develop a periodic material delivering schedule to minimize the space required for inventory. We take a leading home appliance manufacturing system in China as a case problem to study the material delivery scheduling optimization problem so as to ensure the synchronization between production and material delivering. The problem can be divided into a number of subproblems with each of them served by a turnover vehicle (TV) and this paper investigates one of its subproblems. With the combinatorial nature, we design a grey wolf optimizer algorithm. Experiments and comparisons are made with existing metaheuristics to validate the proposed algorithm. Results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.