A single machine scheduling problem with air transportation decision

Abstract

Production scheduling and transportation strategies in manufacturing systems are two important topics in the fields of production or supply chain management. These two decisions are usually separately discussed in previous works. However, since a business may simultaneously face these two problems, it needs to develop a model to simultaneously deal with these two problems so as to minimize the total costs. This paper deals with a production scheduling and air-transportation problem with a single-machine and multi-delivery destinations. A heuristic approach is developed to deal with this problem. Computational results show that the heuristic approach can produce nearly optimal solutions for small-scale problem and can produce feasible solutions that commercial optimization software, Lingo, can not solve within a reasonable amount of time. © 2011 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.