Inspired by the industries such as food and beverage, metal and steel, as well as petroleum and petrochemical ones, the current study addresses a joint order acceptance and scheduling, lot streaming in a flexible flow shop and batch delivery problem. For maximizing a profit objective function with trading off between the revenue of the accepted orders and the costs incurred, a novel mixed integer linear programming is proposed. This paper develops a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm based on the Genetic Algorithm. In the developed algorithm, (1) a heuristic, (2) a local search, and (3) a restart phase is proposed. To set the appropriate parameters of the algorithms, Taguchi experimental design was applied. The obtained results reveal the appropriate performance of the hybrid genetic algorithm.

This paper analyzes a supply chain, which consists of a manufacturer, a retailer and several suppliers in which the retailer orders jobs to the manufacturer and the suppliers provide the requiring parts. The manufacturer schedules and processes the orders and dispatches them to the retailer either individually or collectively in batches. The manufacturer incurs a penalty cost for each tardy job and a transportation cost for every delivered batch and therefore, searches for a schedule that yields minimum number of tardy jobs and batches. Moreover, the manufacturer tries to optimize its supplying cost through locating the suppliers that offer appropriate release times and costs for manufacturing parts. Since the release times of parts directly affect scheduling of orders, in this research, we develop an integrated mathematical model for the manufacturer that incorporates suppliers & apos; selection issue into the scheduling and batching decisions. Furthermore, we present a heuristic algorithm (greedy algorithm) and also a local search to quickly determine the optimal or near-optimal solutions. The computational analysis shows the importance of the integrated model and also the superiority and effectiveness of the heuristic algorithms.

This paper addresses scheduling a set of weighted jobs on a single machine in presence of release date for delivery in batches to customers or to other machines for further processing. The problem is a natural extension of minimizing the sum of weighted flow times by considering the possibility of delivering jobs in batches and introducing batch delivery costs. The classical problem is NP-hard and then the extended version of the problem is NP-hard. The objective function is that of minimizing the sum of weighted flow times and delivery costs. The extended problem arises in a real supply chain network by cooperation between two layers of chain. Structural properties of the problem are investigated and used to devise a branch-and-bound solution scheme. Computational experiments show the efficiency of suggested algorithm for solving instances up to 40 jobs.