Hierarchical Modeling of a Tabu Search Based Manufacturing Plant Order Sequencing and Vehicle Dispatching Problem

With the rapid advance of manufacturing technology and the increasing use of call centers in industry, it is very common nowadays for customers to expect their goods to be delivered within hours or specified time windows by online ordering. For a zero inventory company, that means the cycle time from receiving orders to production and delivery the finished goods to customers has to match with customer’s request. The purpose of this paper is to present a hierarchical modeling approach for such kind of just-in-time systems. It shows that such a problem could be mapped into a variant of Vehicle Routing Problems and based on which, a Tabu Search based heuristic method is proposed to obtain improved solutions upon an initial solution.