Title: Integrating production and transportation scheduling in a two-stage supply chain

Authors: Ching-Jong Liao; Yu-Wei Kuo; Tsui-Ping Chung; Stephen C. Shih

Addresses: Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan ' Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan ' College of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun, 130025, China ' School of Information Systems and Applied Technologies, University, Carbondale, Southern Illinois, IL 62901, USA

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the research on coordinated scheduling of production and transportation in a two-stage supply chain. The first stage involves scheduling multiple suppliers with various production speeds while the second stage deals with the scheduling job of several vehicles under the assumption that each vehicle is travelling at a different speed and has different transport capacity. The primary objective of this research is to minimise the maximum completion time for all jobs. With that, a new heuristic is proposed and an electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) algorithm is developed for searching a near optimal or optimal solution. Computational results show that the proposed EM algorithm embedded with the heuristic significantly is better than an existing gendered genetic algorithm, with an average improvement of 20.66% while using much less computation time. [Received 31 December 2012; Revised 28 May 2013, 9 February 2014; Accepted 7 March 2014]

Keywords: electromagnetism-like mechanisms; scheduling coordination; two-stage supply chains; transport scheduling; production scheduling; supply chain management; SCM.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2015.069344

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2015 Vol.9 No.3, pp.327 - 343

Published online: 13 May 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article