Two calibrated meta-heuristics to solve an integrated scheduling problem of production and air transportation with the interval due date

Contrary to previous methods in production management, today’s approaches mainly focus on the whole supply chain parties’ considerations. Considering production planning and distribution, as the two main functions in supply chain (SC) management, in an integrated manner in order to enhance the SC advantages is one of today’s main dilemma. Here, we have firstly proposed and investigated the integrated production and air transportation scheduling problem with time windows for the due date to minimize the total SC costs. Since the problem was NP-hard, two new coordinated and integrated solution procedures have been presented based on meta-heuristics. Four algorithms (i.e., simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization/district PSO (PSO/DPSO), and hybrid variable neighborhood search–simulated annealing (H-VNS–SA)) have been developed in both procedures. For the first time in literature, we probe different encoding schemes in the proposed algorithms. In addition, by using Taguchi experimental design, the parameters of the algorithms have been tuned. Besides, to study the behavior of the algorithms, different problem sizes have been generated and the results of two procedures have been compared together and discussed. Finally, a comparison of the proposed algorithms with some state-of-art optimized algorithms has been presented to prove statistically better performance of the proposed algorithms in most cases.