Distributed supply-chain project rescheduling: Part II - Distributed affected operations rescheduling algorithm

Affected Operations Rescheduling (AOR) is a process of rescheduling only the operations directly and indirectly affected by a disruption through the propagation of change caused by a disruption while preserving as much as possible the robustness of the initial schedule (preschedule). AOR is basically a centralized heuristic, and thus not readily suitable for project rescheduling in a supply chain where independent and autonomous enterprises do not completely share all the relevant information between each other. This paper is mainly concerned with substantially extending AOR into a distributed version, distAOR, for distributed rescheduling. The primary emphasis of the discussion is placed upon how to deal with the research issues of enterprise autonomy and heterogeneity from the aspects of supply-chain modelling, problem formulation, and solution algorithm. The convergence of the resulting distAOR is theoretically demonstrated. The computational study reported in the first part indicates that the superior efficiency of distAOR is largely due to the fact that only minimum information is shared between enterprises, but at the cost of its lost effectiveness also due to limited information sharing.