Abstract :
This study is concerned with how the quality of perishable products can
be improved by shortening the time interval between production and distribution. Since
special types of food, such as dairy products, decay fast, the Integration of Production
and Distribution Scheduling (IPDS), is investigated. This article deals with a variation
of IPDS that contains a short shelf life product; hence, there is no inventory of the
product in the process. Once a speci c amount of the product is produced, it must be
transported with the least transportation time directly to various customer positions within
its limited lifespans to minimize the delivery and tardy costs required to complete producing
and distributing of the product to satisfy the demand of customers within the limited
deadline. After developing a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model of the problem,
because it is NP-hard, an Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) is proposed.
IPSO performance is compared with commercial optimization software for small-size and
moderate-size problems. For large-size ones, it is compared with the genetic algorithm
existing in the literature. Computational experiments show the eciency and e ectiveness
of the proposed IPSO in terms of both the quality of the solution and the time of achieving
the best solution.
