Integrated Production and Transportation Scheduling on Parallel Batch-Processing Machines

This paper studies an integrated scheduling problem which consists of both production and transportation stages. Jobs are processed on a set of parallel batch-processing machines in the production stage, and then transported to a target customer in the transportation stage. The aim is to find an optimal integrated production and transportation schedule with the objective to minimize the weighted sum of total delivery time and total transportation cost with a relative preference α. A 0-1 mixed integer programming model is then constructed. To solve the proposed model, which is NP-hard, a developed GA is proposed to produce near-optimal solutions for large-size instances. Computational experiments on 720 instances with up to 150 jobs and 5 parallel batch-processing machines show the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed GA.