Synchronized scheduling of assembly and multi-destination air-transportation in a consumer electronics supply chain

Abstract

The paper studies the problem of synchronizing air transportation and assembly manufacturing to achieve accurate delivery with minimized cost in a consumer electronics supply chain. The motivation for this study came from a major computer manufacturer in a consumer electronics industry that faces challenges in the final stages of delivery of a supply chain. The synchronization problem is decomposed and formulated as two sub-problems, i.e. a multi-destination air transportation allocation problem and an assembly-scheduling problem. The first sub-problem is formulated and solved as an integer linear programming problem. For the assembly-scheduling problem, two solution methodologies using the concepts of forward and backward scheduling are presented. Computational results indicate that the proposed methodologies can achieve considerable cost reduction compared with the existing methodology applied in industry.

Keywords:

• Consumer electronics supply chain
• Air transportation
• Assembly manufacturing
• Synchronization

Acknowledgements

Work was supported by the Singapore-MIT alliance and School of Mechanical & Production Engineering, Nanayang Technological University, Singapore. The authors gratefully acknowledge the referees for a detailed review, comments and suggestions that improved the presentation of concepts described. The authors thank Dr Mathirajan M, Indian Institute Science, for helpful suggestions concerning the content and presentation of this study.