Minimizing Total Cost in Integrated Scheduling of Production and Distribution Using Ant Colony Optimization

The integrated scheduling is a scheduling that applied in more than one problem. In this paper, we discuss about integrated scheduling of distribution and production problem in manufacturer. In the case of production, jobs are processed in several machines. In the case of distribution, one vehicle is used to distribute the product to the several customers. The objective of this paper is minimizing total cost in the production and distribution process. Since these problems are included in NP-hard problem, we suggest ant colony optimization method to solve both parts of the problem. We generate random data to verify the performance of the proposed method. Our result show that the performance of the method is excellent.