A heuristic approach to synchronize production and transportation planning in a mineral water industry

Planning problems arise in different circumstances with a set of parameters, decision variables and constraints, particularly capacity constraints. Synchronizing production plan and transportation plan at item level in medium-short term, however, has received little attention in the prior literature. This paper aims at solving a production planning problem that depends not only on internal process and forecast data, but also on subsequent transportation planning. For a multi-product industrial case over a finite planning horizon, an adapted model is established and an improvement-based heuristic is proposed to find a near-optimal solution in a reasonable amount of computation time, with the data from a French mineral water company. The results are compared against those of Cplex to solve an MIP model and those of a combined heuristic-Cplex procedure. The comparison demonstrates that the proposed heuristic algorithm works efficiently.