ABSTRACT
Production and distribution are two important processes in supply chain. In the recent two decades, many works have been done on integrated production-distribution models in strategic and tactical planning fields (Bilgen and Ozkarahan, 2004, Chen, 2004, Goetschalcks et al., 2002). These articles consider inventory decisions to link these two parts of supply chain in decision problems. Contrary to this, integrated production and distribution scheduling problem has come into consideration, recently. For having a global optimal solution for our
12.1 Introduction 253 12.2 Literature Review 254 12.3 Problem Description 256 12.4 Solution Approach 262
12.4.1 Exact Solution 262 12.4.2 Proposed Algorithm 263
12.5 Numerical Study 266 12.6 Conclusions 267 References 268
scheduling problem in production and distribution parts of supply chain, we must consider these two parts integrated. It is very important in make-to-order products because for this kind of products like time-sensitive products, we should find an optimal solution to have on-time delivery with the minimum cost. Formerly, scheduling of production and distribution parts was done consecutively, in other words, the output of production scheduling decision was an input of distribution scheduling part. It has been shown that this sequential approach has suboptimal solution (Chen and Vairaktarakis, 2005, Pundoor and Chen, 2005). Thus, integrated production-distribution scheduling is optimal and more beneficial.
