Simultaneous Production and Transportation Problem to Minimize the Total Cost of Waiting Time and Tardiness

Customer demands for personalized products and fast delivery have become increasingly significant in e-commerce competition. Additive manufacturing (AM) has emerged as a solution to address the requirements of customized production. A recent advancement in AM, the mobile mini-factory, enables a truck equipped with a single 3D printer to produce orders en-route to customer’s location. This innovative mode of simultaneous production and transportation can reduce delivery times and storage expenses for companies. In this study, we investigate a simultaneous production and transportation problem to minimize the total cost of waiting time and tardiness (referred to as SPTP-CWT). The problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. A heuristic approach, simulated annealing with hybrid mutation algorithm (SA-HM), is developed to solve large-sized instances. Computational experiments are conducted on benchmark instances and the results indicate that the proposed SA-HM is capable to give better solutions within a reasonable computation time when compared to directly solving the MILP model and an ant colony optimization algorithm.