Production scheduling problem with delivery considerations in a mono-product supply chain environment to minimise the total joint cost

This paper chooses a supply chain which involves multiple supply links as the studied object. In each supply link, we consider an integrated scheduling problem in which a set of identical jobs are first processed on a single machine, and then batch delivered to a customer by a transporter. Each job has a due date specified by the customer in each supply link. It is supposed that a job which is finished before its departure date or delivered to the customer before its due date will incur a corresponding inventory cost. The objective is to find a joint schedule for each supply link such that the total cost of the supply chain is minimised. We show that this problem is NP-hard in the maximum capacity of the transporters, and then propose a dominance-related greedy algorithm and a genetic algorithm. Computational results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed heuristics. [Received 7 January 2010; Revised 18 February 2011; Revised 21 June 2011; Accepted 13 February 2012]