Integrated Scheduling of Multi-Stage Production System and Transportation in the Supply Chain by Considering the Sequence Dependent Setup Time

In this research, an integrated scheduling problem of job shop systems with an assembly stage and transportation to minimize the total tardiness time is studied. In this problem, the parts are processed in a job shop system and then assembled in the assembly stage. Ultimately, the products are shipped in packages to customers. Setup time is assumed to depend on sequence. At first, a mixed-integer linear model is developed. Since the problem is NP-hard, a hybrid imperialist competitive and simulated annealing (ICA-SA) algorithm is proposed to solve the problems with the medium and large sizes. To validate the performance of the proposed algorithm, results are compared to an imperialist competitive algorithm and a hybrid imperialist competitive and tabu search (ICA-TS) algorithm. Analysis of variance random block design is used to compare the results of the algorithms. P-values of algorithms and blocks in this test are smaller than the significance level of 0.05. The computational results show that the proposed hybrid algorithm achieves better performance than the imperialist competitive algorithm and hybrid imperialist competitive and tabu search.