Production and delivery scheduling problem with time windows

This paper deals with the problem of selecting and scheduling the orders to be processed by a manufacturing plant for immediate delivery to the customer site. Among the constraints to be considered are the limited production capacity, the available number of vehicles and the time windows within which orders must be served. We first describe the problem as it occurs in practice in some industrial environments, and then present an integer programming model that maximizes the profit due to the customer orders to be processed. A tabu search-based solution procedure to solve this problem is developed and tested empirically with randomly generated problems. Comparisons with an exact procedure show that the method finds very good-quality solutions with small computation requirements. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.