Synchronizing Schedules for Transportation

5. Conclusion and Further Research

In this chapter, the formulation of synchronized scheduling problem of production and transportation is presented. The solution methodology is to decompose the overall problem into two sub-problems, i.e., the transportation allocation problem and machine scheduling problem. The 3PL transportation allocation problem is formulated using an integer programming model. It is shown that the problem is solvable in polynomial time. Furthermore, the formulations for single machine with and without random delay are presented. The methods to solve these two problems are summarized. Further research can address the assembly sub-problem with parallel machines or sequential machines, etc.