Supply chain optimisation with both production and transportation integration: multiple vehicles for a single perishable product

Abstract

This paper deals with an extension of the integrated production and transportation scheduling problem (PTSP) by considering multiple vehicles (PTSPm) for optimisation of supply chains. The problem reflects a real concern for industry since production and transportation subproblems are commonly addressed independently or sequentially, which leads to sub-optimal solutions. The problem includes specific capacity constraints, the short lifespan of products and the special case of the single vehicle that has already been studied in the literature. A greedy randomised adaptive search procedure (GRASP) with an evolutionary local search (ELS) is proposed to solve the instances with a single vehicle as a special case. The method has been proven to be more effective than those published and provides shorter computational times with new best solutions for the single vehicle case. A new set of instances with multiple vehicles is introduced to favour equitable future research. Our study extends previous research using an indirect resolution approach and provides an algorithm to solve a wide range of one-machine scheduling problems with the proper coordination of single or multiple vehicles.