Analysis and algorithms for coordinated scheduling of parallel machine manufacturing and 3PL transportation

Nowadays, it is popular to outsource transportation and distribution of finished products to third-party logistics (3PL) providers in many industries. In order to shorten the response time from order receipt to delivery, and also to improve on-time delivery accuracy, the decision of manufacturing scheduling and transportation scheduling should consider the constraints between manufacturing and transportation. In this paper, we study a coordinated scheduling problem of parallel machine assembly manufacturing and multi-destination transportation in the make-to-order (MTO) consumer electronics supply chain (CESC). By considering the constraints between parallel machine assembly and 3PL transportation, the overall problem is decomposed into a parallel machine scheduling sub-problem and a 3PL transportation sub-problem. The 3PL transportation problem is proved to be NP-complete. Heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the parallel machine assembly scheduling problem.