Machine scheduling with outsourcing

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to study the use of outsourcing as a mechanism to cope with supply chain uncertainty, more specifically, how to deal with sudden arrival of higher priority jobs that require immediate processing, in an in-house manufacturer's facility from the perspective of outsourcing. An operational level schedule of production and distribution of outsourced jobs to the manufacturer's facility should be determined for the subcontractor in order to achieve overall optimality. Design/methodology/approach -The problem is of bi-criteria in that both the transportation cost measured by number of delivery vehicles and schedule performance measured by jobs' delivery times. In order to obtain the problem's Pareto front, we propose dynamic programming (DP) heuristic solution procedure based on integrated decision making, and population-heuristic solution procedures using different encoding schemes based on sequential decision making. Computational studies are designed and carried out by randomly generating comparative variations of numerical problem instances. Findings -By comparing several existing performance metrics for the obtained Pareto fronts, it is found that DP heuristic outperforms population-heuristic in both solutions diversity and proximity to optimal Pareto front. Also in population-heuristic, sub-range keys representation appears to be a better encoding scheme for the problem than random keys representation. Originality/value -This study contributes to the limited yet important knowledge body on using outsourcing approach to coping with possible supply chain disruptions in production scheduling due to sudden customer orders. More specifically, we used modeling methodology to confirm the importance of collaboration with subcontractors to effective supply chain risk management.

Empirical research on performance effects of supply chain resilience: systematic literature review, citation network analysis and future research directions

“…It is uncertain for the daily operations of the focal firm when a downstream or upstream partner is suffering from disruptions (Hendricks et al, 2009). To reduce the effect, we suggest managers to adopt SCRES strategies such as SC integration and collaboration across functions and partner firms, geographic dispersion of the procurement from reliable suppliers to ensure supply stability, and outsourcing strategies from many other available suppliers in case of disruptions in existing supply (Liu and Lee, 2018;Liu et al, 2014;Lorentz et al, 2012).…”

“…It is applicable to explain how SCRES is adopted to handle SC disruptions and uncertainties in business operations (Liu et al, 2014;Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009).…”

“…It requires similar environmental situations that a firm or an SC need to address, e.g., disruption and the demand for resiliency or robustness, to make two clusters closer, see the fifth reason in Table 3. For example, Wagner and Bode (2008) which is an SC restoration article is cited by Kern et al (2012), Kilubi and Rogers (2018), Liu et al (2014) and Macdonald and Corsi (2013), which are SCRM articles, as all realise the vulnerable and unstable environment firms often face in their SCs. This suggests the importance of taking account of operating conditions in future studies.…”

Optimization of Dynamic and Multi-Objective Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Based on Parallel Hybrid Algorithm

“…(2) The researchers qualitatively analysed the effects of interferences on production cost and production plan [15]. For instance, Liu et al suppressed the impact of external disturbance on production scheduling through outsourcing [16]. Azizoglu and Alagöz remeasured the production cost with the total makespan and designed an optimized scheduling algorithm, aiming to disclose the influence of the addition of new tasks on the original scheduling plan [17].…”