Supply chain scheduling with batching, production and distribution

In this paper, the authors study a class of supply chain scheduling problems. The manufacturer has batch-processing machines with limited capacity and provides products for the customers. The products are in different sizes which are ordered by the customer and when processed, the products are divided into batches given that the total size of a batch does not exceed the machine capacity. After the completion of products, they are delivered to customers by vehicles of the manufacturer. The authors investigate two classes of problems where the manufacturer has single customer and multiple customers, respectively. In each class of problems, two machine configurations are considered including single machine and identical parallel machines. The authors analyse the computational complexity of the problems and present integer programming models. Then the authors propose polynomial time algorithms using approximation algorithms and dynamic programming. For each algorithm, the time complexity and the performance guarantee are analysed.