Parallel machine scheduling with batch delivery to two customers (Q1665075)

Summary: In some make-to-order supply chains, the manufacturer needs to process and deliver products for customers at different locations. To coordinate production and distribution operations at the detailed scheduling level, we study a parallel machine scheduling model with batch delivery to two customers by vehicle routing method. In this model, the supply chain consists of a processing facility with \(m\) parallel machines and two customers. A set of jobs containing \(n_1\) jobs from customer 1 and \(n_2\) jobs from customer 2 are first processed in the processing facility and then delivered to the customers directly without intermediate inventory. The problem is to find a joint schedule of production and distribution such that the tradeoff between maximum arrival time of the jobs and total distribution cost is minimized. The distribution cost of a delivery shipment consists of a fixed charge and a variable cost proportional to the total distance of the route taken by the shipment. We provide polynomial time heuristics with worst-case performance analysis for the problem. If \(m = 2\) and \((n_1 - b)(n_2 - b) < 0\), we propose a heuristic with worst-case ratio bound of 3/2, where \(b\) is the capacity of the delivery shipment. Otherwise, the worst-case ratio bound of the heuristic we propose is \(2 - 2 /(m + 1)\).