Synchronizing Schedules for Transportation
Read this article. It discusses synchronizing transportation schedules. Because the logistics segment of the cycle is a large-scale effort, the waiting and queues are magnified. How many different modes of transportation do you think are required to make a product from raw material to the customer's hand?
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.