Joint production and delivery scheduling in two-level supply chains: a distributed agent approach

This paper is concerned with a joint production and delivery scheduling problem in two level supply chains, i.e., the schedule of both production and delivery (transportation) are simultaneously minimizes the total cost in the supply chain. This joint scheduling problem is difficult to tackle using analytical approaches. A distributed agent based approach is thus proposed to solve the problem. The advantages of the approach includes global optimization perspective with local optimization, being able to handle complicated scheduling problems in supply chains with uncertainties, and not difficult to implement. The proposed approach is also experimented with several data sets in both practical and simulation environments. The experiments show promising results.