A decomposition and cutting plane approach to the integrated scheduling and distribution problem in the supply chain

Integration of supply chain decisions has become one of the most attractive and practical topics for researchers. The scheduling of the production and distribution of customer orders are two most important activities of these decisions, which both of them affect the supply chain performance in timely delivery of orders and reduce costs. This study addresses the problem of integrating these two decisions. The problem has been investigated from a multi-agent point of view. A mixed integer programming model is proposed to the problem. Regarding the problem structure, first, the problem is decomposed into two problems, and then a cutting plane approach is used to solve it. The computational results indicate the proper performance of the proposed algorithm.