Integrated Scheduling of Production and Distribution with Release Dates and Capacitated Deliveries

This paper investigates an integrated scheduling of production and distribution model in a supply chain consisting of a single machine, a customer, and a sufficient number of homogeneous capacitated vehicles. In this model, the customer places a set of orders, each of which has a given release date. All orders are first processed nonpreemptively on the machine and then batch delivered to the customer. Two variations of the model with different objective functions are studied: one is to minimize the arrival time of the last order plus total distribution cost and the other is to minimize total arrival time of the orders plus total distribution cost. For the former one, we provide a polynomial-time exact algorithm. For the latter one, due to its NP-hard property, we provide a heuristic with a worst-case ratio bound of 2