Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem With Order Sharing and Time Value of Money

Abstract

Order sharing is an active part in the emerging manufacturing resource sharing architectures. Time value of money is one of the most important factors considered by manufacturing industries in sharing economy. While order sharing and time value of money are very common in practice, they have attracted limited research activities from the machine scheduling community. This paper addresses this gap and studies the identical parallel machine scheduling problem by jointly considering order sharing and time value of money. The objective is to determine the sharing policies of orders and the scheduling policies of machines to maximize the total future value of profits. A mathematical programming model is derived to solve this problem, and heuristic algorithm is proposed for large scale scenarios. To assess the performance of the heuristic, a series of numerical computational experiments is evaluated using randomly generated examples.