Developing an MILP model to minimize makespan in distributed no-wait flow shop with transportation time

Recent globalization trend causes the emergence of intense competition for the best interest between the manufacturers. To maintain competitiveness in these markets, companies decide to establish a production network consisting of several factories. The Members scattered in different geographical locations in distributed structures cause the availability of cheaper resources, higher production capability and faster facing to changes and higher competitive ability. For this purpose, in this research, a distributed multi-factory scheduling is studied on no-wait flow shop environment. Furthermore, to consider the possibility of moving jobs between factories, a transportation network is compromised in the structure of the research problem. This research aims to develop a new mathematical model for distributed no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with transportation time with make span minimization. The proposed mathematical model is coded in LINGO9 and is solved by Cplex solver.