Bicriteria supply chain scheduling on unrelated-parallel machines

This article addresses the unrelated-parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times for minimizing the work-in-process inventory (WIP) while maximizing the customer service level in a supply chain. The machine availabilities and job releases are considered dynamic. In order to meet a variety of needs of the producer and customers, a mathematical model that conforms to a bicriteria objective has been developed. As the proposed research problem is shown to be NP-hard, a metasearch heuristic based upon tabu search is also developed to solve industry-size problems. Moreover, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed search algorithm, the search algorithmic solutions obtained for example problems are compared with that of the optimal solutions of the mathematical model obtained from CPLEX. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first of its kind attempted for this scheduling problem in a supply chain.