Heuristic algorithms to minimize the total tardiness in a flow shop production and outbound distribution scheduling problem

In this paper, we consider a production and outbound distribution scheduling problem, coming from a real life problem in a chemotherapy production center. Only one vehicle with infinite capacity is available for delivery. The production workshop is an m-machine flow shop. To each job is associated a processing time per machine, a location site and a delivery due date. The travel times are known. The problem is to define a production schedule, batches of jobs, and delivery routes for each batch, so that the sum of tardiness is minimized. Heuristic algorithms are proposed and evaluated on random data sets.