Supply Chain Coordination And Scheduling Problem

With the rapid development of the global economy, more and more enterprises emphasize on the coordination with the partners to improve the supply chain competitive capability. The coordination of the supply chain partners has become an important issue of supply chain management. It can help the enterprise reduce cost, improve the service level and response to the market quickly. This paper focuses on the integrated scheduling of the 3-tier supply chain and the coordination mechanisms of agile supply chain. The main contents are as follows:The integrated scheduling model of 3-tier supply chain including a supplier, a manufacturer and several customers is considered. In the supply chain, a set of jobs are processed in two stages (by the supplier and the manufacturer) and delivered to the customers in the order specified by the corresponding customer. The objective is to minimize the total transportation cost and improve the customer service level, which is achieved by scheduling the jobs and delivering them to the next stage in batches. Based on the features of the optimal schedules, a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is proposed. Then, the complexity of the algorithm is analyzed, which shows that the algorithm can solve the problem in polynomial time when the number of customers is fixed. Then a simulated annealing algorithm (SA) and a heuristic algorithm (HAIS, which is improved to HAIS(H)) are proposed. At last, the simulation results of the DP, SA, HAIS (H) and SPT are presented.The integrated scheduling model of 3-tier supply chain with fixed delivery dates is considered. In the model, the available times at which batches may be delivered are fixed before the schedule is determined. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the total delivery cost and the tardiness penalty by production scheduling, batch delivery and vehicle routing decisions. Based on the features of the optimal schedules, a DP algorithm, a max-min ant system (MMAS), a SA algorithm and EDD rule are proposed. The simulation results show the effectiveness of MMAS. A flexible agent-based system architecture for agile supply chain is presented. A planning and coordination(P&C) agent consortium, composed of a P&C center agent, a procuring P&C agent, a transportation P&C agent and a financing P&C agent, is proposed to coordinate among stock agents, manufacturer agents and transportation agents under an extended contract net protocol. Then, the optimizing models for the planning and coordination of demand-driven supply chain are suggested.Virtual enterprises highly depend on information technologies in order to react rapidly to markets and to cooperate among partners. The flexibility and expansibility of the information system architecture are required at a high-level. A new coordination mechanism for virtual enterprises based on mobile agent technology is put forward, whose flexibility and expansibility of business process is realized through work flow technique based on XML. The realization mechanism of the work flow engine which adopts Java reflection is presented. Through the realization of allying, changing and supervising mobile agent, the application of work flow under the proposed mechanism is illustrated. The development of master-slave pattern under Aglet is also introduced.