Integrated Scheduling of Production and
Outbound Distribution in a Supply Chain
Zhi-Long
Chen
Department of Decision & Information Technologies
Email: zchen@rhsmith.umd.edu
In
many applications involving time-sensitive (e.g., seasonal or perishable)
products, finished orders have to be delivered to customers immediately or
shortly after the production. Consequently, there is little or no finished
product inventory in the supply chain such that production and outbound
distribution are very intimately linked and must be scheduled jointly in order
to achieve a desired on-time delivery performance at minimum total cost. Research on integrated scheduling models of
production and outbound distribution is relatively recent, but is growing very
rapidly. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the latest developments
in this area. We will present some application examples from the latest
literature, classify existing models from the latest literature into several
different classes, and for each class of the models give an overview of the
tractability of the various problems and solution approaches studied in the
literature. In addition, we will discuss potential values of production-outbound
distribution integration in various model contexts, and identify some areas for
future research.