Coordinated scheduling of production and delivery from multiple plants and with time windows using genetic algorithms

This paper deals with the problem of selecting and scheduling a set of orders to be manufactured and immediately delivered to the customer site. We provide m plants for production and V vehicles for distribution. Furthermore, another constraints to be considered are the limited production capacity at plants and time windows within which orders must be served. A genetic algorithm to solve the problem is developed and tested empirically with randomly generated problems. In order to benchmark the GA, a graph-based exact method is proposed. However, such exact method is not efficient and, therefore, can only be used for small problems. Results attest that our GA produces good-quality solutions.