Assigning and Scheduling Orders in a
Make-to-Order Supply Chain
Zhi-Long
Chen
Department of Decision and Information Technologies
Email: zchen@rhsmith.umd.edu
We
consider a make-to-order supply chain consisting of several global plants and a
domestic distribution center. Orders received shortly before a selling season
need to be assigned to the plants and detailed scheduling of orders needs to be
determined at each plant. A distribution schedule also needs to be determined
for delivering completed orders to the distribution center. Different plants
have different productivity and hence different production costs and times for
an order. The objective of order assignment and scheduling is to optimize the
tradeoff between total production and distribution cost and an order delivery
lead time performance. We study various cases of the problem by classifying
their computational complexity and proposing algorithms for solving them. We
also analyze worst-case and asymptotic performance analysis of several
heuristics and conduct computational tests.