Machine scheduling with pickup and delivery

The coordination of production, supply, and distribution is an important issue in logistics and operations management. This paper develops and analyzes a single-machine scheduling model that incorporates the scheduling of jobs and the pickup and delivery arrangements of the materials and finished jobs. In this model, there is a capacitated pickup and delivery vehicle that travels between the machine and the storage area, and the objective is to minimize the makespan of the schedule. The problem is strongly NP-hard in general but is solvable in polynomial time when the job processing sequence is predetermined. An efficient heuristic is developed for the general problem. The effectiveness of the heuristic is studied both analytically and computationally. Naval Research Logistics 52: 617-630, 2005.