Integration of production and shipping planning: a co-operative approach

This article deals with the integration of the production planning and the shipping planning processes in a real company within a just-in-time environment. Perfect integration between production and shipping is needed because 2500 m3 of products are daily sent to many different destinations using few outgoing doors. Most existing papers focus on the scheduling aspects alone, and assume that a product is shipped to a single destination. We propose a decision support system (DSS) to schedule simultaneously the production and the semi-trailers used for shipping. This DSS shares the decision between the user and a computer, and focuses on the organisational aspect of scheduling. This DSS creates incrementally a solution by considering successively the critical aspects and the criteria of each actor. This original integration approach is tested on the industrial case and compared to more classical approaches.