Online Integrated Production and Distribution Scheduling: Review and Extensions

Abstract

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 .

Competitive Analysis of Algorithms for an Online Distribution Problem

“…We refer to Borodin and El-Yaniv [3] and to Hentenryck and Bent [4] for a comprehensive description of online algorithms and competitive analyses, to Albers [5] for a survey on online algorithms, and to Jaillet and Wagner [6] for a survey of online vehicle routing problems. Recent contributions have been presented by Chen et al [7] for an online machine minimization problem; Ma et al [8] for online knapsack problems; Ber ǵe et al [9] for the online k-Canadian traveller problem; Li et al [10,11], Yu and Jacobson [12], Shamsaei et al [13], and Jiang et al [14] for online scheduling problems; Akbari et al [15] for a post-disaster road restoration problem; Zhang et al [16] for the management of online orders in modern crowdsourced truck logistics platforms; Shiri et al [17] for ambulance routing in disaster response with partial or no information on victim conditions; Fujii et al [18] for the Secretary problem with predictions; Arnosti et al [19] for static threshold policies in the prophet Secretary problem; Salem et al [20] for Secretary problems with biased evaluations using partial ordinal information; Shiri et al [21] for the ambulance routing problem on a road network; and Chen et al [22] for a review of online integrated production and distribution scheduling. Finally, for an extensive overview of the most recent contributions on online algorithms, we refer the work by to Höhne et al [23][24][25] and Amouzandeh et al [26].…”