Modeling and solving the combined production scheduling and vehicle routing problem in flexible Job Shop production systems

Abstract

Today, market behavior and globalization mean that end consumers are waiting for their orders to be delivered very quickly. This context forces companies to have a high availability of finished products or to improve their response capacity. For this reason, the companies in the supply chains are obliged to implement strategies to meet this customer need. One of the most efficient practices is the integration of production and transportation activities decisions. In the literature, models for productions have been found that have been integrated little with the transportation activities. Due to this, the main objective of this project is to design solution strategies based on heuristic and/or meta-heuristic procedures to solve the combined scheduling-routing problem when the production stage is a Flexible Job Shop . In order to meet this objective, the combined problem is characterized by identifying the main elements of each problem individually and their interactions using a mathematical model. After this, sequential and combined solution approaches based on meta-heuristic algorithms are presented.