In many applications involving make-to-order or time-sensitive (e.g., perishable, seasonal) products, finished orders are often delivered to customers immediately or shortly after the production. Consequently, there is little or no finished product inventory in the supply chain such that production and outbound distribution are very intimately linked and must be scheduled jointly to achieve a desired on-time delivery performance at minimum total cost. Research on integrated scheduling models of production and outbound distribution is relatively recent but is growing very rapidly. In this paper, we provide a survey of such existing models. We present a unified model representation scheme, classify existing models into several different classes, and for each class of the models give an overview of the optimality properties, computational tractability, and solution algorithms for the various problems studied in the literature. We clarify the tractability of some open problems left in the literature and some new problems by providing intractability proofs or polynomial-time exact algorithms. We also identify several problem areas and issues for future research.

Integrated Production and Outbound Distribution Scheduling: Review and Extensions

The third comprehensive survey on scheduling problems with setup times/costs

In most manufacturing and distribution systems, semi-finished jobs are transferred from one processing facility to another by transporters such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and conveyors, and finished jobs are delivered to customers or warehouses by vehicles such as trucks. Most machine scheduling models assume either that there are an infinite number of transporters for delivering jobs or that jobs are delivered instantaneously from one location to another without transportation time involved. In this paper, we study machine scheduling problems with explicit transportation considerations. Models are considered for two types of transportation situations. The first situation involves transporting a semi-finished job from one machine to another for further processing. The second appears in the environment of delivering a finished job to the customer or warehouse. Both transportation capacity and transportation times are explicitly taken into account in our models. We study this class of scheduling problems by analysing their complexity. We show that many problems are computationally difficult and propose polynomial or pseudo-polynomial algorithms for some problems. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Machine scheduling with transportation considerations

Smart City and IoT

https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=bus_facpub

Order acceptance and scheduling: A taxonomy and review

Two-stage scheduling on identical machines with assignable delivery times to minimize the maximum delivery completion time

We consider the online scheduling of equal-length jobs with incompatible families on \(m\) identical batch machines. Each job has a release time, a deadline and a weight. Each batch machine can process up to \(b\) jobs (which come from the same family) simultaneously as a batch, where \(b\) is called the capacity of the machines. Our goal is to determine a preemption-restart schedule which maximizes the weighted number of early jobs. For this problem, Li et al. (Inf Process Lett 112:503–508, 2012) provided an online algorithm of competitive ratio \(3+2\sqrt{2}\) for both \(b=\infty \) and \(b<\infty \). In this paper, we study two special cases of this problem. For the case that \(m=2\), we first present a lower bound 2, and then provide an online algorithm with a competitive ratio of 3 for both \(b=\infty \) and \(b<\infty \). For the case in which \(m=3\), \(b=\infty \) and all jobs come from a common family, we present an online algorithm with a competitive ratio of \((8+2\sqrt{15})/3\approx 5.249\).

Jinjiang Yuan

Papers

Two-stage scheduling on identical machines with assignable delivery times to minimize the maximum delivery completion time

Improved online algorithms for the batch scheduling of equal-length jobs with incompatible families to maximize the weighted number of early jobs

Primary-secondary bicriteria scheduling on identical machines to minimize the total completion time of all jobs and the maximum T-time of all machines

Bicriteria scheduling to minimize total late work and maximum tardiness with preemption

Online scheduling of incompatible unit-length job families with lookahead