Integrated process planning and scheduling with minimizing total tardiness in multi-plants supply chain

In this paper, we propose an integrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) model for the multi-plant supply chain (MSC), which behaves like a single company through strong coordination and cooperation toward mutual goals. The IPPS problem is one of the most important issues for supporting the global objectives, because the function takes part in the assignment of factory resources to production tasks. The problem is formulated as a mathematical model considering alternative machines and sequences, sequence-dependent setup, and distinct due dates. The objective of the model is to decide the schedules for minimizing total tardiness through analysis of the alternative machine selection and the operation sequences in MSC. In order to obtain good approximate solutions, genetic algorithm-based heuristic approach is developed. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.