Optimization of Inventory Space in Smart Factory for Integrated Periodic Production and Delivery Scheduling

With severe global competitions, how to control inventory so as to reduce the material storage space plays a pivotal role in reducing the daily cost resulted from the land rental. The goal of this article is to develop a periodic material delivering schedule to minimize the space required for inventory. We take a leading home appliance manufacturing system in China as a case problem to study the material delivery scheduling optimization problem so as to ensure the synchronization between production and material delivering. The problem can be divided into a number of subproblems with each of them served by a turnover vehicle (TV) and this article investigates one of its subproblems. We build a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for the problem and use the CPLEX optimizer to solve small-size problems. With the combinatorial nature, we design a Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) algorithm to solve large-size problems. Extensive experiments are done, and comparisons are made with existing metaheuristics to validate the proposed algorithm. Results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.