For increasing the efficiency of the supply chain (SC), it is necessary to take into account the interactions and relationships between the stages of procurement of raw materials, manufacturing the products, and distributing them. An integrated framework is proposed in this paper for companies interested in meeting the demand for different products in the customer zones by establishing a number of plants and distributors at the candidate sites and in having SC design with reconfiguration capability based on changes in demand and more proper economic opportunities. For this purpose, a geographically distributed cell design is proposed for the selection of the proper location for each of the facilities and the production process of the products. A mixed integer linear programming model is presented here for the integration of the sectors for procurement, production, and distribution of the products in the SC. In light of the NP-hard class of the cell formation problem, a new algorithm titled hybrid genetic ant lion optimization (HGALO) algorithm is presented for finding the optimal or near-optimal solutions. A comparison is also made here between the proposed algorithm and the genetic algorithm (GA) for demonstration of the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The quality of the solutions generated based on the HGALO algorithm demonstrates the capability and effectiveness of the algorithm in finding high quality solutions. © 2017, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.
