Amir Mohammad Fathollahi-Fard - Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran, Behshahr
Mostafa Hajiaghaei-Keshteli - Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran, Behshahr

Nowadays, the production scheduling systems are integrated by different transportation networks, e.g., airplanes, trains, and ships. Although the integrated air transportation and production scheduling problem is modelled with different factors, according to the literature reports, a fuzzy environment along with capacitated transportation systems has been scarcely considered. These facts motivate our attempts to contribute to a new formulation of this problem while considering the aforementioned suppositions. Another contribution of this study is to apply a number of nature-inspired metaheuristics. Accordingly, not only Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are used as famous metaheuristic algorithms existing in the literature, but also two recent ones, namely, Keshtel Algorithm (KA) and Virus Colony Search (VCS), are considered for the first time in the literature. In addition, the Taguchi experimental design method is utilized to tune the algorithms’ parameters. Bygenerating different test problems, KA reveals a better performance when solving large-sized samples, in comparison to other metaheuristics.

Integrated capacitated air transportation and production scheduling; Fuzzy environment; Metaheuristics; Keshtel algorithm;Virus colony search