An effective two phase heuristic for synchronized seru production scheduling and 3PL transportation problems

This paper concerns with synchronized seru production scheduling and transportation problems, in which seru is a new production mode deriving from Japanese electronic assembly industry. In order to realize fast response in seru production system (SPS) according to the just-in-time principle, the decision of seru production scheduling and transportation is considered synchronously. Without loss of generality, the transportation works are assumed to be in charge by a third-party logistics (3PL) company. The intractability of synchronized seru production scheduling and 3PL transportation problem is confirmed by analyzing the properties, and the upper and lower bounds of makespan are provided along with developing the linear program compress model. Accordingly, an effective two phase heuristic algorithm is designed, in which the first phase uses three moves and two swaps to obtain a locally optimal permutation, and the second phase employs the shortest path algorithm based on 4-opt strategy to form the optimal synchronized schedule. Finally, computational experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of proposed two phase heuristic algorithm, and empirical observations are also reported.