Routing and Production Scheduling for a Mobile Factory

In last decades, mobile factories have been used due to their high production capability, carrying their equipment and covering rough and uneven routes. Nowadays, more companies use mobile factories with the aim of reducing the transportation and manufacturing costs. The mobile factory must travel between the suppliers, visit all of them in each time period and return to the initial location of the mobile factory. In this paper, we present an integer nonlinear programming model for production scheduling and routing of mobile factory with the aim of maximization of profit. This problem is similar to the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) which is an NP-hard problem. Also at each supplier, the scheduling problem for production is NP-hard. After linearization, we proposed a heuristic greedy algorithm. The efficiency of this heuristic algorithm is analyzed using the computational studies on 540 randomly generated test instances. Finally, the sensitivity analysis of the production cost, transportation cost and relocation cost was conducted.