Scheduling the Operations of an Integrated Production- Distribution Process

We consider a variation of the integrated scheduling problem where the operations of a capacitated facility and a fleet of heterogeneous vessels must be sequenced to minimize the operating cost during a multi-period production and distribution process. We prove the NP-hardness of the problem, analyze the problem properties, and propose a partial linear-programming relaxation based heuristic approach. We also derive an error bound of this heuristic for a special case of the problem. Finally, the empirical observations on the computational performance of the heuristic under general cases are reported.