Multi-site scheduling under production and transportation constraints

Abstract

For the enterprises organised in several distributed production sites, usually, production scheduling models presume either an instantaneous delivery of products or an unlimited number of available vehicles for transporting products. However, the transportation of the intermediate products to the sites is an important activity within the whole process of manufacturing, and the efficient coordination of production and transportation becomes a challenging problem in the actual higher collaborative and competitive environments. This work focuses on the integrated production and transportation scheduling properly managing the resources capacity, material flows and temporal interdependencies between sites. A case-study is reported and the industrial problem under consideration is modelled as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Besides scheduling under resource constraints, the model presented in this paper expands the packing problem to the area of transportation operations scheduling. It is implemented under the constraint programming language CHIP V5. The provided solutions determine values for the various variables associated to the production and transportation operations realised on the whole multi-site, as well as the curves with the profile of the total consumption of resources in time.