Coordinated Production and Distribution Scheduling in Flowshop with Limited Waiting Times

Abstract

This paper studies a coordinated production and distribution scheduling problem in flowshop with limited waiting times, which restricts the maximal waiting times in consecutive processing machines and between the production and distribution. This problem usually arises in the manufacturing of timeliness products, such as food and newspaper. In this problem, one order contains many jobs. Job is the smallest unit in the production, and order is the smallest unit of transportation. Moreover, there is one vehicle for transportation, and only one order can be shipped at one time. This problem is a joint decision of production scheduling and distribution scheduling, which is a strongly NP-hard problem. A mixed integer programming model is established for this problem with the objective of minimizing the tardiness, and a co-evolutionary genetic algorithm is presented. Computational experiments were carried out and experimental results verified the effectiveness of the model and algorithm.