Coordinating Production and Delivery Schedule of Multi-Product and Multi-Customer through Mathematical Programming

Abstract

Due to the shortage and high cost of shipping containers, manufacturers that distribute products for worldwide customers must optimize their delivery. Commonly, they complete their delivery schedule first before creating the production schedule. This article tries to address the scheduling problem arising in the process of creating the production schedule to meet the delivery schedule. The complexity of the situation is increased since there is concern about producing as few product types as possible in a single period and having a balance of production load over multiple periods. A mathematical programming model for addressing this production scheduling problem is proposed in the form of integer programming. This model can be solved using LINGO, a commercial mathematical programming software. Microsoft Excel® spreadsheets are used to store both the data input and the output of the mathematical programming model. The advantages of using Excel are its easy-to-read format and familiarity with most users in various companies. Computational experiments in several cases show that the proposed method is effective to create the production and delivery schedule in various problem settings as expected.