A Comparison of GRASP and an Exact Method for Solving a Production and Delivery Scheduling Problem

In this paper we consider the production and delivery scheduling problem, a problem that deals with the selection of orders to be processed by a manufacturing plant and immediately delivered to the customer site. Orders have a fixed due date and must be prepared in a single plant with limited capacity. A limited number of vehicles are available for delivery. A ready-mix concrete manufacturing case study has motivated this research. We describe an exact method to find optimal solutions based on the construction of a graph that collects all feasible solutions. We also describe a greedy randomized adaptive search (GRASP) for the problem that finds good, though not necessarily optimal, solutions.

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