A Joint Scheduling of Production and Distribution Operations in a Flow Shop Manufacturing System

چکیده مقاله

Abstract. In traditional scheduling problems and many real-world applications, the
production operations are scheduled regardless of distribution decisions. Indeed, the
completion time of a job in such problems is de ned traditionally as the time when the
production sequences of a job are nished. However, in many practical environments,
completed orders are delivered to customers immediately after production stages without
any further inventory storage. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate an integrated
scheduling model of production and distribution problems simultaneously. It is assumed
that products proceed through a permutation
ow shop scheduling manufacturing system
and are delivered to customers via available vehicles. The objective of our integrated model
is to minimize the Maximum Returning Time (MRT), which is the time it takes for the
last vehicle to deliver the last order to a relevant customer and return to production center.
The problem is formulated mathematically, and then an Improved Imperialist Competitive
Algorithm (I-ICA) is proposed for solving it. Furthermore, a sucient number of test
problems are generated for computational study. Various parameters of the algorithm
are analyzed to calibrate the algorithm by means of the Taguchi method. At the end,
the e ectiveness of the proposed model and suggested algorithm is evaluated through a
computational study where the obtained results show the appropriate performance of the
integrated model and solving approach in comparison to those of the other algorithms.