Coordinated Production and Delivery Operations With Parallel Machines and Multiple Vehicles

This paper investigated a coordinated optimization problem of production and delivery operations with parallel machines and multiple vehicles so that a more cost-effective and sustainable supply chain performance can be achieved. We propose an effective hybrid metaheuristic solution framework to deal with this problem, by which the investigated problem is decomposed into 3 sub-problems namely, vehicle assignment, parallel machine scheduling and traveling salesman sub-problem. This framework is established for handling the 3 sub-problems in a coordinated manner so as to simplify the optimization process and to reduce the computational complexity. To evaluate the effectiveness of the methodology, this paper integrates a genetic algorithm, the longest processing time heuristic and a tabu search under this framework to solve the investigated problem. Extensive numerical experiments have been conducted and experimental results show that the proposed solution framework can handle the investigated problem efficiently and effectively.