Integrating production and transportation scheduling in a two-stage supply chain

This paper is concerned with the research on coordinated scheduling of production and transportation in a two-stage supply chain. The first stage involves scheduling multiple suppliers with various production speeds while the second stage deals with the scheduling job of several vehicles under the assumption that each vehicle is travelling at a different speed and has different transport capacity. The primary objective of this research is to minimise the maximum completion time for all jobs. With that, a new heuristic is proposed and an electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) algorithm is developed for searching a near optimal or optimal solution. Computational results show that the proposed EM algorithm embedded with the heuristic significantly is better than an existing gendered genetic algorithm, with an average improvement of 20.66% while using much less computation time. [Received 31 December 2012; Revised 28 May 2013, 9 February 2014; Accepted 7 March 2014]