“…In the area of production decision-making, a great number of papers have been published and there are also comprehensive survey papers (Dolgui and Prodhon 2007;Wang et al 2009;Wazed, Ahmed, and Nukman 2010), which involve a large number of research areas, including aggregate planning (Sakalli, Baykoc, and Birgoren 2010;Fahimnia, Farahani, and Sarkis 2013), shop scheduling (Engin, Ceran, and Yilmaz 2011;Jolai, Rabiee, and Asefi 2012) and assembly line balancing (Hu et al 2010;Guo et al 2012), etc. However, little attention has been paid on the production decisionmaking problems in the manufacturing environment with the consideration of multiple production plants located in different regions.…”