Comparison of heuristic procedures for an integrated model for production and distribution planning in an environment of shared resources

In this paper, we present a mathematical model which integrates tactical-operational production and distribution decisions in a shared resources environment. More precisely, we integrate lot sizing production and distribution decisions with vehicle routing decisions. We obtain a global multi-period multi-item multi-vehicle model where a capacity constraint models the link between production and distribution decisions. Three heuristics are presented in order to solve this global model. The first two ones are based on a decomposition approach of the global model in production and distribution submodels. The third heuristic offers a higher level of integration by taking into account transportation decisions in the production planning problem. Computational tests show that the performance of the heuristic depends on the amount of shared resources in the system, the type of customer demand but not on the weight of the production cost against the distribution cost. The three heuristics allow to tackle problems of larger size than an optimal solution approach.