Integrated production and outbound distribution activities with multiple vehicles

Abstract

This paper deals with a variant of the integrated production and outbound distribution scheduling (IPODS) problem by considering multiple heterogenous capacitated vehicles. The problem reflects a real world applications since both production and distribution stages. In production phase orders are produced according to permutation flow shop system. In distribution phase multiple heterogenous capacitated vehicles serve customers and each vehicle can be used more than once. Objective is to determine the integrated schedule which has the minimum summation of total tour time and tardiness. So IPODS problem covers two NP-hard problem which are called as machine scheduling and vehicle routing. Therefore we can say that the integrated problem is also NP-hard. We propose a new mathematical model for integrated problem and evaluate the performance of the model on randomly generated test instances. Comparative results show that CPLEX is able to find optimal solutions for only small sized instances and the performance of the model is not satisfying for operational level scheduling decisions.