Study of synchronized scheduling of parallel machine manufacturing and air transportation within ATO supply chain

This paper studies the problem of synchronized scheduling of production and air transportation in supply chain. Based on the investigation of the properties of this problem, a solution frame work is proposed. Within this framework, the synchronized scheduling problem is decomposed into air transportation sub-problem and production scheduling sub-problem. The constraints between the two sub-problems are considered in the definition and formulation of each sub-problem. The air transportation problem is formulated as an Integer Programming problem. Also, it is proved that this problem is equal to an unbalanced transportation problem. Parallel machine scheduling problem is investigated in the assembly manufacturing stage. This problem is proved to be NP-completeness. Then, simulated annealing algorithm is presented to solve the problem.