Coordinated scheduling of production and delivery from multiple plants

• DOI: 10.1016/j.rcim.2003.10.004
• Publication Date: 2003-11-17T14:20:21Z
• Authors: J.M Garcia; S Lozano; D Canca
• Keywords: 0502 economics and business; 05 social sciences

Abstract This paper deals with the scheduling of orders and vehicle assignment for production and distribution planning in a scenario of no-wait, immediate delivery to the customer site. We first describe the problem and then present an integer programming model that maximizes the weighted value of the orders served. We consider a special case of the problem which can be solved in polinomial time by a minimum cost flow algorithm. Based on this approach we develop a heuristic procedure for the general case. Comparisons with an exact graph-based method attest that our heuristic produces good-quality solutions in short running times.