Incorporating batch delivery in multi-factory supply chain scheduling; Heuristic and lower bounds

In this paper an integrated delivery and production scheduling problem for serial multifactory supply chain is addressed. Consider a supply chain scheduling problem in which number of jobs should be scheduled on series of factories and delivered to downstream factories for processing and finally delivered to the customer. The number of jobs in delivery batches is constrained by the batch size. The high delivery cost in manufacturing systems isthe main motivation of integration of production and delivery scheduling which contains a more holistic view of the supply chain problem. So constituting batches of jobs may reduce the transportation cost but on the other side, it may have incremental effect on the totalholding cost. The objective is to minimize the sum of the total holding cost and the totaltransportation costs. The problem is NP-hard. We formulate the problem as a Mixed IntegerProgramming (MIP) model. Moreover, in this paper, a heuristic and two lower bounds are presented. The effectiveness of these methods are investigated through the computational experiments

Keywords:

Multi-factory scheduling , Supply chain , Batch delivery , Mixed integer programming , Lower bound , Holding cost , Heuristic