ABSTRACT
In the era of E-commerce, discrete manufacturing enterprises (DMEs) are characterized by multitype, small-batch, and flexible production patterns because of personalized and timing requirements of customers. DMEs are vital for the economy and the competition among them is increasingly becoming a competition in the supply chain. However, the matching, coordination, and optimization between the production of most DMEs and the supplying and distribution of up-and downstream partner enterprises are not factored into the production and scheduling plans of the DMEs, resulting in an increase in the total costs of the supply chain and a weakening of their competitiveness. In the existing literature, the research work on scheduling problems in a supply chain environment is limited to the production plans, the established models are generally too simple, the objectives and constraint conditions are too idealized, and the production features of DMEs are not taken into account, which is far from the real-life situations (Frederix, 2001). Thus, the research on the supply chain problems for DMEs is of significant theoretical and practical importance.
