Methodologies for synchronised scheduling of assembly and air transportation in a consumer electronics supply chain

Motivated by a major PC manufacturer in the consumer electronics industry, we study the problem of synchronisation of assembly manufacturing and final deliveries using air transportation to achieve accurate delivery with minimised delivery cost in consumer electronics supply chain (CESC). The customer orders are shipped to the customers by cargo flights. Orders are allocated to the available flight capacities based on customer delivery dates. Synchronisation is considered to match the assembly completion of each order with the departure time of its predetermined allocated flights. We break the synchronisation problem down into two sub-problems consisting of an air transportation allocation problem and an assembly scheduling problem. The first sub-problem is formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model. Two solution methodologies are proposed for the second sub-problem. Computational results indicate that the proposed methodologies can achieve considerable cost reduction compared to the existing industry practice.