Batching Machine Scheduling with Two-Stage Transportation Consideration

This paper considers a coordinated scheduling problem where there is a crane available in the first-stage transportation that transports job from the warehouse to a batching machine and there is a vehicle available in the second-stage transportation to deliver completed jobs from the machine to the customer. The coordinated scheduling problem of production and transportation operations deals with sequencing job transportation and combining the jobs into batches. For the problem with minimizing the makespan and total setup cost, Tang and Gong(2008) proved that this problem is strongly NP-hard. This paper presents two genetic algorithm (GA) approaches with different results representation for this scheduling problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the regular GA and modified GA (MGA) can find near-optimal solutions in an acceptable amount of computational time. Among these metaheuristic approaches, MGA is superior to the GA in terms of both the computing time and solution quality.