Integrated Production, Inventory, and Batch Delivery Scheduling with Due Date Assignment

This chapter is devoted to integrated production, inventory, and batch delivery scheduling with due date assignment in the context of two-agent scheduling. In this kind of problems, the jobs of the same agent are processed sequentially in batches and the batch processing time is equal to the total processing time of the jobs in the batch, where the batch size can be either bounded or unbounded. A batch is available only when all the jobs in it are completed. An available batch is delivered to its agent immediately, and the cost per batch delivery is fixed and independent of the number of jobs in the batch. Finished jobs are kept in inventory, if necessary, incurring an additional holding cost.