Abstract
In many conventional supply chains, production planning and distribution planning are treated separately. However, it is now demonstrated that they are mutually related problems that must be tackled in an integrated way. Hence, in this paper a new integrated production and distribution planning model for perishable products is formulated. The proposed model considers a supply chain network consisting of a production facility and multiple distribution centers. The facility produces a single perishable product that is storable only for predetermined periods. A homogenous fleet of vehicles is responsible for delivering the product from facility to distribution centers. The decisions to be made are the production quantities, the distribution centers that must be visited, and the quantities to be delivered to them. The objective is to minimize the total cost, where the trip minimization is considered simultaneously. As the proposed formulation is computationally complex, a heuristic method is developed to tackle the problem. In the developed method, the problem is divided into production submodel and distribution submodel. The production submodel is solved using LINGO, and a particle swarm heuristic is developed to tackle distribution submodel. Efficiency of the algorithm is proved through a number of randomly generated test problems.
Highlights
During the past decades, mangers have faced big global changes in the business environment as results of advances in technology, globalization of markets, and new situations in economy and politics
We focus on the integrated production and distribution planning of perishable products
We found that LINGO is not able to find optimal or good quality solution for the above submodel in a reasonable time
Summary
Mangers have faced big global changes in the business environment as results of advances in technology, globalization of markets, and new situations in economy and politics. With the increase of the number of world-class competitors, organizations have been under pressure to improve their interorganizational processes. In such situations, managers understood that such changes are not enough in long term, and they must enter in management of their supply, distribution, and after sales companies. Managers understood that such changes are not enough in long term, and they must enter in management of their supply, distribution, and after sales companies With such an approach, the terms “supply chain” and “supply chain management” were created [1]. The supply chain management should coordinate such activities so that customers can have high quality products with minimum possible cost [2]
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