A heuristic algorithm for integrated production and transportation scheduling with multiple transportation modes

This paper addressed an integrated production and transportation scheduling problem in a global MTO supply chain environment with single manufacturer, multiple customers and multiple transportation modes. A mixed integer nonlinear programming model is established. A heuristic algorithm based on forward scheduling is proposed to handle the model. Based on real industrial data, the performance of the heuristic algorithm is compared with the performances generated by 3 methods including genetic algorithm. The comparison results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms is better than the 3 methods.