Hybrid Metaheuristic to Optimize Traceability in the Food Industry

In this paper, the authors propose a new hybrid metaheuristic to solve the problem of manufacturing batch dispersion. The method consists of inserting the record to record travel algorithm (RRT) in the artificial bee colony (ABC) in order to ensure balance between the diversification and the intensification phases. The new technique is named RRT-ABC, and it starts by launching the standard ABC, and then the onlooker research phase is enriched by the RRT algorithm. So, the main idea of this research work is to solve the NP-hard problem of minimizing the batch dispersion using a novel metaheuristic because of the limitation of exact methods. Experimental results, carried on sausage manufacturing in a French food industry, proved the highly efficient performance of the proposed RRT-ABC metaheuristic.