Scheduling of Material and Information Flows in the Manufacturing of Chemicals for the Order-to-Cash Process of a Digital Supply Chain

Abstract

Abstract A scheduling model is proposed to schedule order transactions and manufacturing operations in the order-to-cash process of a digital supply chain. The proposed model is compared to scheduling models that focus on either the order transactions or the manufacturing operations. The advantage of the integrated approach is found in the accuracy of the solutions attained, whereas the purely transactional model is found to be suboptimal, and the production scheduling model is found to be infeasible under certain circumstances. An illustrative example is presented where the integrated model is shown to increase both the system revenue (60% increase) and order-fulfilment (100% increase), compared to the transactional model. The production scheduling model is shown to be infeasible and overestimate the system revenue.