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Abstract
A procedure is developed for the simultaneous scheduling of multi-factory supply chains, including inter-factory transportation. A job-shop scheduling procedure, known to provide near-optimal solutions to industrial-sized problems, is enhanced to include transportation elements in the fundamental model. In order to demonstrate the quality of the solutions, a lower bound calculation is compared to the procedure's solutions on a number of large-scale test problems. The lower bound is an enhancement of the classic lower bound calculation for the N-job, M-machine job shop. The computational effort in scheduling is linear in the size of the problem, and high quality solutions to large-scale problems can be obtained in seconds.