A coordinated production and transportation scheduling problem with minimum sum of order delivery times

In this paper, a coordinated production scheduling and vehicle routing problem aiming at minimizing the sum of order delivery times is considered, where there are a single machine for production and limited number of homogenous capacitated vehicles for transportation. Given the complexity of the studied problem, a variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm is proposed to address this problem. To construct initial solution, vehicle routing is determined with nearest insertion first, whereby the order batch production sequence is determined based on three propositions. Moreover, ten neighborhood structures are designed and a local search algorithm based on tabu search algorithm is proposed for intensification. The effectiveness of the proposed VNS algorithm is validated by comparing it with CPLEX and two heuristic algorithms in the existing literature. The computational results show that the proposed VNS algorithm can obtain optimal or near optimal solutions of the problem and is superior to the two heuristic algorithms proposed in the existing literature.