Combining production and distribution in supply chains: The hybrid flow-shop vehicle routing problem

Many supply chains are composed of producers, suppliers, carriers, and customers. These agents must be coordinated to reduce waste and lead times. Production and distribution are two essential phases in most supply chains. Hence, improving the coordination of these phases is critical. This paper studies a combined hybrid flow-shop and vehicle routing problem. The production phase is modeled as a hybrid flow-shop configuration. In the second phase, the produced jobs have to be delivered to a set of customers. The delivery is carried out in batches of products, using vehicles with a limited capacity. With the objective of minimizing the service time of the last customer, we propose a biased-randomized variable neighborhood descent algorithm. Different test factors, such as the use of alternative initial solutions, solution representations, and loading strategies, are considered and analyzed.