Coordinated scheduling of the outsourcing, in-house production and distribution operations

Xueling Zhong, Jie Fan and Jinwen Ou

European Journal of Operational Research, 2022, vol. 302, issue 2, 427-437

Abstract: In this paper we study coordinated scheduling of the outsourcing, in-house production and distribution operations. In our integrated scheduling model, each job is either outsourced by paying a cost, or processed by one of the in-house machines. Processed jobs are delivered in batches by vehicles with identical capacities, where each job has a non-identical physical size. The objective is to determine the subsets of jobs to be outsourced and a joint production and delivery schedule for the rest of the jobs that are processed in-house, so that the makespan of the jobs processed in-house plus the total cost of outsourcing and delivery is minimized. The proposed scheduling problem is strongly NP-hard. We formulate the scheduling problem into a neat mixed integer programming (MIP) and present an efficient 2-approximation algorithm. We also develop a sophisticated (32+ϵ)-approximation algorithm, where ϵ∈(0,1) can be any small constant. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated through numerical experiments.

Keywords: Scheduling; Outsourcing; Batch delivery; Approximation algorithm; Worst-case analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:302:y:2022:i:2:p:427-437

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2022.01.003

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