Integrated Production and Distribution Scheduling in Mobile Facilities

Many supply chains lack flexibility and adaptability in today's competitive market, resulting in customer dissatisfaction, backorders, and several extra costs for the business. Additionally, the inability to quickly meet the customer's demands and the unnecessary transportation costs is also one of the significant challenges faced by the fixed facilities' supply chain. To address these challenges, this study analyzed the mobile facilities supply chain and the production, distribution, and delivery of goods conducted by trucks based on customer preferences. This study proposes a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model to ensure the mobile facilities' routing and manufacturing schedules are optimized to meet the customer's needs. Furthermore, this model minimizes production and distribution costs in the shortest amount of time. An exact decomposition algorithm based on Benders decomposition is used to find high-quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time to tackle the problem efficiently. We present several acceleration strategies for increasing the convergence rate of Benders' decomposition algorithm, including Pareto optimality cut and warm-up start. The warm-up start acceleration strategy itself is a meta-heuristic based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). Using the Benders decomposition, we demonstrate the superior accuracy of our solution methodology for large-scale cases with 10 kinds of products ordered by 30 customers using 10 mobile facilities.