Serial batching scheduling of deteriorating jobs in a two-stage supply chain to minimize the makespan

This paper investigates the coordinated scheduling problem of production and transportation in a two-stage supply chain, where the actual job processing time is a linear function of its starting time. During the production stage the jobs are first processed in serial batches on a bounded serial batching machine at the manufacturer's site. Then, the batches are delivered to a customer by a single vehicle with limited capacity during the transportation stage, and the vehicle can only deliver one batch at one time. The objective of this proposed scheduling problem is to make decisions on job batching and batch sequencing so as to minimize the makespan. Moreover, we consider two different models. With regards to the scheduling model with a buffer for storing the processed batches before transportation, we develop an optimal algorithm to solve it. For the scheduling model without buffer, we present some useful properties and develop a heuristic H for solving it. Then a novel lower bound is derived and two optimal algorithms are designed for solving two special cases. Furthermore, computational experiments with random instances of different sizes are conducted to evaluate the proposed heuristic H, and the results show that our proposed algorithm is superior to other four approaches in the literature. Besides, heuristic H in our experiments can effectively and efficiently solve both small-size and large-size problems in a reasonable time.