Integrated Distributed Production and Distribution Problem for Minimizing Earliness and Tardiness Penalty

Abstract

Production and distribution play essential roles in a supply chain. How to integrate them for overall high performance has become an important problem in academia and industry. This work proposes an intelligent optimization method to solve an Integrated Distributed Production and Distribution problem with Time-windows (IDPDT). We need to assign the jobs among flow shops and deliver the products by vehicles to customers within required time windows. Accordingly, a mathematical programming model is built to minimize total weighted earliness and tardiness and an improved brainstorm optimization algorithm is developed by fully considering problem characteristics. Through a comparison with a memetic algorithm, the experiment results indicate that the developed approach is effective in handling the investigated problem.