Article ID: | iaor20084425 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 177 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 2069 |
End Page Number: | 2099 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2007 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Naso David, Turchiano Biagio, Kaymak Uzay, Surico Michele |
Keywords: | scheduling |
The coordination of just-in-time production and transportation in a network of partially independent facilities to guarantee timely delivery to distributed customers is one of the most challenging aspect of supply chain management. From a theoretical perspective, the timely production/distribution can be viewed as a hybrid combination of planning, scheduling and routing problems, each notoriously affected by nearly prohibitive combinatorial complexity. From a practical viewpoint, the problem calls for a trade-off between risks and profits. This paper focuses on the ready-mixed concrete delivery: in addition to the mentioned complexity, strict time-constraints forbid both earliness and lateness of the supply. After developing a detailed model of the considered problem, we propose a novel meta-heuristic approach based on a hybrid genetic algorithm combined with constructive heuristics. A detailed case study derived from industrial data is used to illustrate the potential of the proposed approach.