| Author: | Sun, Xuting |
| Title: | The impact of liner shipping unreliability on the production-distribution scheduling of a decentralized manufacturing system |
| Advisors: | Chung, S. H. Nick (ISE) Chan, T. S. Felix (ISE) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2018 |
| Subject: | Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations Business logistics Production management |
| Department: | Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering |
| Pages: | xviii, 163 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Production and distribution scheduling are two key activities at the operational level in a supply chain. Due to fierce competition in the market and high expectation on the service level from customers, the linkage between production and distribution become more and more close. However, achieving customer satisfaction, as well as controlling the overall cost, is a critical issue. On the one hand, to meet the customized needs from global clients in the competitive market environment, more and more manufacturers are changing their production network from centralized to decentralized. For multi-factory manufacturing systems, production and distribution scheduling problems are much more complicated than the single-factory integrated scheduling problems, because bi-assignment problems are involved. On the other hand, as the connected channel between manufacturers and overseas customers, maritime transport cannot be avoided in global supply chains. However, the regular shipping schedules and the long shipping lead-time dominate the production and distribution decisions made by the manufacturers. When the actual schedules deviate from the published ones, not only the shippers (manufacturers) but also their customers face uncountable losses because of the delays. In reality, schedule unreliability is a common problem in the shipping industry. Both internal and external factors, which are not under the control of the shipping companies, bring about negative impacts on the timely arrivals of vessels. As for the manufacturer with a decentralized production network, there is no doubt that the assignment and scheduling decisions become much more complicated in compensating for the effects of shipping limitations as well as uncertainties. However, most of the literature studied the integrated scheduling problem under a single-factory manufacturing system in a local supply chain without consideration of the limitations from liner shipping. In addition, almost all the existing studies focus on shipping unreliability from the perspective of the shipping companies. Studies for identifying the impact of shipping uncertainties on the production and distribution scheduling from the perspective of the shippers are quite limited. This research mainly focuses on the study of the effects of shipping limitations and uncertainties on the production and distribution scheduling for a decentralized manufacturing system and fills the research gaps aforementioned. The main contributions made through this research are as follows: Firstly, a new and practical deterministic model was proposed for multi-factory job allocation and production-distribution scheduling problems in which inland distance-dependent transportation lead-time and maritime transport limits and variations are taken into consideration. The objective was to minimize the total operating costs, i.e., cost of production, storage, inland and maritime transport, earliness and tardiness. A pure mathematical approach was proposed and formulated into a mixed-integer programming (MIP). A new valid inequality called due-date based cut-off rule (DBC) was exploited to reduce the computational burden of the exact algorithm without removing the optimal solutions. Moreover, a hybrid 2-level fuzzy guided genetic algorithm (H2LFGGA) was developed for more practical and large-scale problems. In this GA, a new mutation operation based on a novel fuzzy controller was introduced. The numerical experiments demonstrated the reliable performance of the proposed integrated model for the variations in external shipment schedules and production cost difference among factories. Managerial insights were obtained in terms of the production scheduling decisions under a multi-factory manufacturing environment. Thirdly, a new stochastic model was proposed for the multi-factory production and distribution scheduling problem under liner shipping uncertainty. The aim was to make a trade-off between total operating costs and risk costs to achieve more reliable decisions. The closed form of the individual risk cost for any arbitrary probability distribution was formulated corresponding to the loss function composed of both earliness and tardiness penalties. It verified the effects of shipping uncertainty on jobs allocation, production scheduling and shipment selections. The computational and statistical evaluation clearly demonstrated that the new approach can compensate for the amplification effects between the high penalty level and shipping uncertainty. Managerial insights were obtained when facing liner shipping uncertainties. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 991022096434403411.pdf | For All Users | 2.19 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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