An integrated planning of production and distribution for multiple suppliers

This work addresses the production and distribution of a single product supplied by multiple suppliers and demanded by multiple demanders. A production scheduling and vehicle routing model is proposed for the multiple suppliers, multi-vehicle, and vehicle capacity constraint problems. There are three stages as follows: first, distribute the least distributed amount from each supplier location; second, distribute the amount of inventory attributed to the constraint of production lower bound of each supplier location; and third, design vehicle tours by considering both production and transportation costs. The integrated production scheduling and distribution problem can obtain a lower cost solution than the combined solution of the conventional production scheduling problem and distribution planning problem. Simulation results confirm the theoretical analysis.