Order acceptance and scheduling with batch delivery

摘要

We study an order acceptance and scheduling problem with batch delivery in a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a customer. The manufacturer can rejects some orders placed by the customer, and processes the others on parallel machines and then delivers them to the customer in batches. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the maximum lead time of the accepted orders and the total cost of rejecting and delivering orders. We develop two approximation algorithms for this NP-hard problem.