An Iterated Greedy approach to integrate production by multiple parallel machines and distribution by a single capacitated vehicle

Abstract Studies in the literature have shown that for production systems the integration of manufacturing and distribution decisions is appealing for both experimental and real-world applications. Although the number of papers in which strategies are proposed to solve such Integrated Scheduling Production, Inventory and Distribution Problems (ISPIDP) is growing, algorithms are required for this category of problems. This study was aimed to integrate a scheduling problem of parallel machines with sequence dependent setup time with a delivery system composed of a single vehicle with multiple routes. To address this ISPIDP, two new algorithms, one constructive heuristic and an improvement heuristic based on the Iterated Greedy technique were implemented and their results compared with a Mixed-Integer Programming model and a Genetic Algorithm adapted from studies in the literature. The results indicated that the algorithms were able to obtain good results, although it is clear that the number of machines involved affected the performance of each algorithm differently.