ABSTRACT
Different material supply-related decisions intensively affect the efficiency of manufacturers. To obtain a suitable supply-related protocol, this study proposes a supply selection model which considers both manufacturers’ development orientation and material ordering. In contrast to traditional approaches that rely on expert opinions, the proposed approach in this study allows the time series analysis (ARIMA) to forecast the trend in manufacturers’ development during the execution of the plan. Based on the predicted trend, taking the minimum of total material management cost as the objective function, the control function and optimization conditions are constructed to select the appropriate protocol. The dynamic prediction protocol is obtained by considering the variation in production and material costs by an evolutionary algorithm. The model enables users to determine material supply protocol in continuous time and autonomously adapt to changes in the manufacturers’ production goals within a lower convergence time.