Production planning and scheduling in virtual manufacturing

A virtual corporation is formed by different companies with their own technology and capacity. One problem encountered in forming a virtual corporation is to assign tasks to each partner company and scheduling the production based on the strength of each of them. In this paper, two models are developed for production planning and scheduling in a virtual corporation. This virtual corporation is formed by a number of manufacturing companies (manufacturing centers) and assembly companies (assembly centers). The first model allocates products to the assembly centers so that the total average setup and inventory cost is minimized. The model is solved with an efficient heuristic algorithm. The second model deals with scheduling the manufacturing centers. The solution approaches developed in the paper are useful in design of products by suggesting appropriate product structures.