Optimisation of the replenishment problem in the Fashion Retail Industry using Tabu-Bees algorithm

The problem of properly allocating several different products in the stores network is one of the crucial processes in the Retail Industry. This means trying to meet market demand and at the same time reducing logistics costs. In this context, main aims of the presented work are to (a) otpimise the replenishment process for the retailer's network of companies with multi-product multi-store configuration and (b) propose a new algorithm which combines the Basic Bees algorithm, a swarm based optimization technique, with the Tabu-Search principles. Attention is focused on the particular case of lost sales and budget constraints for a fashion company. Simulation results show that the use of the Tabu-Bees algorithm can guarantee an average 10% improvement in results allowing the model to overcome local minima.