Authors: Chiara Franciosi, Salvatore Miranda, Raffaele Iannone, Alfredo Lambiase
An important issue in a supply chain is to manage carefully replenishment cycles of stored items because of its strong impact both on production and stock management costs. The literature offers several papers debating this issue with a recent focus on the possibility to offset the items inventory cycles in order to reduce the maximum required space. A genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed in order to determine the optimal offsetting inventory cycles of items stored in the same warehouse. The heuristics was validated through the comparison with the most adopted and cited methodology, showing the effectiveness of the GA, able to provide better results than those previously presented in the literature. The GA was finally applied to a realistic case of a production system, showing a minimization of the maximum peak in the time horizon without relevant additional costs, together with a higher and more regular saturation of the warehouse.