INTEGRATED PRODUCTION–TRANSPORTATION SCHEDULING IN A TWOMACHINE FLOW SHOP

摘要

The coordination of operations between production and transportation is important for companies which adopt direct-sell e-business models as their way of doing business. In this paper, a two-machine flow shop scheduling model that incorporates routing decisions of vehicles for serving customers at different locations are developed. The objective of our model takes into account both customer service level and total transportation cost. The customer service level is measured by a function of the sum of job arrival times. The transportation cost of a shipment consists of a fixed charge and a variable cost proportional to the total distance of the route taken by the shipment. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense in general. However, we develop polynomial time algorithms for two special cases of the general problem with fixed number of customers. The computational complexity of our algorithms is also analyzed.