Distributed Scheduling Problem Considering Network Configuration and Transportation Costs

Today, with the increasing advancement of technology, in many large factories, the production of products has changed from a single-factory to a multi-factory environment. Rising customer demand and the complexity of their expectations, the ability to compete with other competitors in delivering products, as well as lower production costs in such manufacturing environments, are among the factors that have forced many factories to distribute their manufacturing in several production units in recent years. Therefore, production planning and scheduling in such conditions are very important. In fact, in distributed production environments, each factory can be considered as a separate entity that includes its characteristics, limitations, and performance, and this factor has made the distributed production scheduling problems more complex than the production scheduling problems for just one factory. Therefore, in this study, a mixed-integer linear programming model is presented for the distributedproduction scheduling problem considering network configuration in two echelons, in which the first and secondechelon factories have a hybrid flow shop and flexible job shop environments, respectively. The proposed biobjectivemathematical model aims to minimize the maximum completion time of jobs and transportation costsbetween echelons. The proposed model is solved for a small-size instance by GAMS software and the results arereported