Single machine serial batching and scheduling problem with deteriorating jobs for production-distribution supply chain under discrete due-date constraints

We study serial batching scheduling of deteriorating jobs in a production-delivery supply chain to minimise the total logistics cost. Each job should be delivered to customer within its guarantee period. We define that if a job which is finished before its departure date or delivered to the customer before its due date will incur respectively a work-in-process or customer inventory cost. We first formulate the problem as a general model and prove its complexity in a general way. Then we study a special case of the problem and propose a tabu algorithm for solving it. In order to evaluate the proposed tabu algorithm, we compare it with CPLEX solver for small size problem instances, and with a lower bound for large size problem instances. The results of experiments indicate that the proposed tabu algorithm is efficient for the randomly generated problems in terms of both solution quality and time efficiency. [Received 31 January 2015; Accepted 16 September 2015]