A resource constrained scheduling problem with multiple independent producers and a single linking constraint: A coal supply chain example

Anu Thomas, Jayendran Venkateswaran, Gaurav Singh and Mohan Krishnamoorthy

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 236, issue 3, 946-956

Abstract: This paper examines a resource constrained production planning and scheduling problem motivated by the coal supply chain. In this problem, multiple independent producers are connected with a resource availability (or, linking) constraint. A general description of such problems is provided, before decomposing the problem into two levels. In the first level, we deal with production planning and in the second level, we deal with tactical resource scheduling. A real-world coal supply chain example is presented to anchor the approach. The overall problem can be formulated as an integrated mixed integer programming model which, in several cases, struggles to find even a feasible solution in reasonable amount of time. This paper discusses a distributed decision making approach based on column generation (CG). Computational experiments show that, the CG scheme has significant advantages over the integrated model and a Lagrangian relaxation scheme proposed by Thomas et al. (2013). This paper concludes with detailed discussions on the results and future research directions.

Keywords: Distributed decision making; Coordinated scheduling; Resource constrained scheduling; Column generation; Job scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221713008084
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:236:y:2014:i:3:p:946-956

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2013.10.006

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().