Tabu search and lower bounds for a combined production-transportation problem

  • Authors:

  • Alessandro Condotta;Sigrid Knust;Dimitri Meier;Natalia V. Shakhlevich

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK;University of Osnabrück, Institute of Computer Science, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany;University of Osnabrück, Institute of Computer Science, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany;School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

  • Venue:
  • Computers and Operations Research
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In this paper we consider a combined production-transportation problem, where n jobs have to be processed on a single machine at a production site before they are delivered to a customer. At the production stage, for each job a release date is given; at the transportation stage, job delivery should be completed not later than a given due date. The transportation is done by m identical vehicles with limited capacity. It takes a constant time to deliver a batch of jobs to the customer. The objective is to find a feasible schedule minimizing the maximum lateness. After formulating the considered problem as a mixed integer linear program, we propose different methods to calculate lower bounds. Then we describe a tabu search algorithm which enumerates promising partial solutions for the production stage. Each partial solution is complemented with an optimal transportation schedule (calculated in polynomial time) achieving a coordinated solution to the combined production-transportation problem. Finally, we present results of computational experiments on randomly generated data.