Abstract
Recently, many modern industries have adopted joint scheduling of production and distribution decisions. Such coordination is necessary in make-to-order (MTO) businesses, where it is challenging to achieve timely delivery at minimum total cost and meet the requirements for high customization. To deal with these challenges, a practical production configuration and delivery method is required, in addition to a closer link between production and distribution schedules. Hence, in this study, we address an integrated production scheduling-vehicle routing problem with a time window, where it is assumed that production is performed in a flexible job-shop system. Our framework is modeled as a novel bi-objective mixed integer problem, in which the first objective function aims to minimize a sum of the production and distribution scheduling costs, and the second objective function tries to minimize a weighted sum of delivery earliness and tardiness. To practically validate the application of our framework, a case study from a furniture manufacturing company producing customized goods is considered, and experimental data are derived. Based on the real data, the model is first optimally solved by an Image 1constraint method, and then a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) algorithm is developed to solve the model for medium- and large-sized problems in a reasonable time. We discuss the benefits of integration by comparing the results of the proposed model with that of the separate approach. The results show that the company can establish a proper rational balance between cost and customer concerns, and they can use the integration policy as a lever to improve customer satisfaction without the system experiencing a significant increase in total operational cost.