Toward an integrated modeling approach for production and delivery operations in flow shop system: Trade-off between direct and routing delivery methods

In this paper, the joint scheduling of production and delivery operations as both pivotal and important operations in the manufacturing system are studied with an integrated vision. Two distinct problems which depend on the delivery method are considered. In first problem, the integrated M-flow shop production and delivery with direct method is introduced. In second problem, scheduling of M-flow shop and delivery with Routing Decision Method is investigated. The purpose is to minimize the total cost which includes sum of the production and delivery cost. The problems are formulated mathematically, and then an improved imperialist competitive algorithm (I-ICA) is proposed to solve the problems. In order to achieve robust results, parameters of the I-ICA are set by means of the Taguchi method. In the computational study, four appropriate test problem sets are generated randomly. At the end, capability of algorithm, effectiveness of the proposed integrated models and efficient delivery method are evaluated through a computational experiment.