Integrated inventory and production policy for manufacturing with perishable raw materials

This research investigates an integrated inventory and production scheduling problem (IIPSP) in a manufacturer that deals with the perishable goods. The objective is to find an optimal schedule to minimize the sum of inventory cost and production cost. Both single-plant problem and multi-plant problem are investigated in this paper. For the single-plant problem, we prove that it is optimal to arrange the processing of raw materials in descending order of the value of the product of consumption rate and unit inventory cost. For the more complex multi-plant problem, we first prove that it is NP-hard, and then, we propose a hybrid intelligent algorithm to solve it. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm is superior to several other algorithms in both effectiveness and efficiency.