Scheduling in a two-stage supply chain with uncertain parameters

Abstract

This article considers a scheduling problem of products and distribution in a two-stage supply chain under uncertain environment. The first stage addresses scheduling a set of jobs on parallel machines with uncertain processing times, while the second stage concerns on delivering finished jobs to customers in batches where the transportation times are assumed to be uncertain. The objective of the problem is to minimize the holding cost, tardiness penalty cost, earliness penalty cost and transportation cost under some constraints. In order to obtain a good approximate solution to the problem, a heuristic algorithm is used. A numerical experiment is carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach and make a comparison between three methods.