A multi-agent approach to the integrated production scheduling and distribution problem in multi-factory supply chain

作者：Gharaei Ali; Jolai Fariborz

来源：Applied Soft Computing, 2018, 65: 577-589.

DOI：10.1016/j.asoc.2018.02.002

• Multi factory supply chain
• Multiagent scheduling
• Batch delivery
• MOEA/D-BA

Research on the integrity of supply chain decisions is constantly increasing. One of the most interesting topics is the integration in production scheduling and distribution decisions. However, there is little study when multiple agents affect the supply chain decisions. In multi-agent scheduling, when customers are considered as agents, each of them has its own jobs with specific objective, and set of customers competes to process the jobs on the shared resources in the supply chain. This paper studies a multi-agent scheduling problem with distribution decisions in a multi-factory supply chain. To save the delivery cost, batch delivery is proposed. It means several jobs, even for different customers, can be distributed in one batch. Some jobs are scheduled to minimize total tardiness while total distribution cost must be minimized. A mixed linear integer programming formulation is proposed. Due to the complexity of the problem, a novel multi-objective based on decomposition which has been combined with bees algorithm is developed to achieve Pareto solutions. Two local searches have been used to improve the Solutions. To evaluate the algorithm, its performance has been compared with three well-known algorithms in the literature. The results of the study show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other tested algorithms.

• 出版日期2018-4