Simultaneous Balancing and Scheduling of Order in a Supply Chain: A Goal Programming Approach

Abstract

To sustain in this fiercely competitive era of industrial globalization, the manufacturers around the world are increasingly adopt a Supply Chain (SC) structures where the multiple production facilities are collaborating together to satisfy the demand. For such kind of SC network, to gratify the customer demand on time, it is an utmost need to ensures the balance and schedule the jobs within production facilities. But, due to the variation in their objectives, i.e. the balancing aims to increase the efficiency irrespective to the completion time and scheduling intend to decrease the make span regardless to the efficiency, it is often difficult to derive the optimal decisions simultaneously. Moreover, the realistic need for incorporating the parallel workstations and the zoning constraints paced by the extra-long task and technical restriction complicate this SC problem further. Even though, the goal programming model can be adopted in this regards as it has the capabilities of optimizing the conflicting objectives. However, till now such a model addressing the issues of station paralleling along with the simultaneous Balancing and Scheduling are rarely available in literature. Hence, in this work, by integrating the issue of resource paralleling, a goal programming model is offered to balance and schedule the jobs in supply chain simultaneously.