Integrated scheduling of production and distribution operations in a global MTO supply chain

This paper addresses an integrated scheduling problem of production and distribution operations with the consideration of several important realistic features, such as multiple plants, multiple order sizes and multiple transportation modes in the commit-to-delivery business mode. This problem exists widely in many global make-to-order supply chain operations, which aims at minimizing the total cost of production and distribution by determining how to assign a large number of customer orders to multiple production plants, and how to transport the finished products to customer-specified global destinations. A memetic algorithm-based optimization approach, integrating a memetic optimization process and some heuristic procedures, is proposed to deal with this problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by extensive numerical experiments based on real industrial data. Experimental results demonstrate that (1) the proposed approach can effectively solve the problem investigated by generating good solutions for industrial-size instances, (2) the integrated scheduling generates better scheduling solutions than the sequential scheduling, and (3) the proposed memetic optimization process exhibits better optimum-seeking performance than a genetic algorithm-based optimization process.