An Approach for the Integration of Production Scheduling and Inter-facility Transportation within Global Supply Chains

On the operational level, production scheduling and transportation planning are usually carried out by different stakeholders, making locally bounded decisions. The integration of both tasks allows for a better management of disruptions that affect the effectiveness of the production and transportation systems. In this paper we study the integrated production and transportation scheduling problem (PTSP) for supply chains comprising an original equipment manufacturer as well as upstream suppliers. Based on a generic framework, the supply chain is structured into a chain of operational planning entities, where for each entity a PTSP arises. The scheduling is performed based on a mathematical programming formulation that takes the current capabilities of the production and transportation systems as well as the previous schedule into account. The computational results obtained are starting point for the development of heuristics.