The Integrated Production and Transportation Scheduling Problem based on a GRASP×ELS resolution scheme

For many years companies and researchers addressed the production and transportation sub-problems separately and sequentially. The problem considered in this paper is the integrated production and transportation scheduling problem (PTSP) with capacity constraints and a short shelf life product with several vehicles. This problem encompasses as special case, the single vehicle problem. In this one, a set of products must be produced before being delivered directly to the customers by complying with lifespan. To solve this problem, an efficient greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), with an evolutionary local search (ELS) is introduced and benchmarked on instances with several vehicles. The method has been proved to be more efficient than previous published ones, providing new best solutions in shorter computational time on this specific problem.