Solving the Production-Routing Problem with energy consideration: A case study from the furniture industry

This work studies the integrated production and distribution planning problem (Production-Routing Problem), where the aim is to capture the dependency between the decisions of production, scheduling, inventory and routing. The PRP in this paper is studied in a furniture company that produces different types of products in a Flexible Flow-shop production process. A Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming model is proposed to solve the problem, and then a linearization technique is utilized, taking into consideration the power supply options that include traditional and renewable energy sources. This approach contributes to an optimal utilization for power sources for a sustainable production system. Experimental results are presented and discussed where the objective is to minimize the total costs.