An Enhanced Hiking Optimization Algorithm With Attention Mechanism for a Practical Joint Replenishment and Delivery Problem

ABSTRACT More and more companies have realised that implementing a joint replenishment and delivery (JRD) strategy can lead to significant cost savings. This paper presents a practical JRD problem for heterogeneous products, taking into account resource constraints. An enhanced hiking optimization technique called BHHOA is proposed. BHHOA incorporates a bound heuristic to refine the delivery frequency boundaries and introduces two new population generation methods based on the differential evolution algorithm and attention mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that BHHOA outperforms six other algorithms with a lower average total cost. The JRD model presented in this study is effectively solved using the BHHOA algorithm. This study provides a practical technical method for companies to implement the JRD strategy.