Online Integrated Production and Distribution Scheduling: Review and Extensions

As a growing number of manufacturers adopt the make-to-order business mode and a growing number of retailers sell online, we are seeing numerous decision problems that can be modeled as what are known in the literature as integrated production and distribution scheduling (IPDS) problems. In such problems, order processing and delivery must be scheduled jointly in order to achieve an optimal balance between total operational costs and overall customer service. Offline IPDS problems, in which the information about every order is known in advance with certainty, are extensively studied. However, research on online IPDS problems, in which orders arrive randomly with their information unknown until they arrive, is relatively recent but is growing rapidly. In this paper, we first describe several real-world applications to illustrate the importance of studying online IPDS problems from a practical point of view. We then review the existing literature on online IPDS problems with a focus on existing online algorithms for these problems and their theoretical performance. We also derive some new results to fill several gaps left in the literature and discuss possible topics for future research.

History: Accepted by Andrea Lodi, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Discrete.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0305.