J Intell Manuf
DOI 10.1007/s10845-010-0434-z
A collaborative scheduling GA for products-packages service
within extended selling chains environment
Pedro Gomez-Gasquet · Raul Rodriguez-Rodriguez ·
Ruben Dario Franco · Angel Ortiz-Bas
Received: 7 July 2010 / Accepted: 8 July 2010
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract The theory of network coordination provides the-
oretical foundations to explain how companies can overcome
organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage
business processes across their selling chains. In particular,
this work focuses on Collaborative Scheduling, a collabora-
tion process whereby selling chain trading partners activate
either on-line or off-line inter-firm coordination mecha-
nisms to jointly plan production activities in order to deliver
the final products to end customers each one of them, being
the delivery date as close to the date desired as possible. The
problem of collaborative scheduling is formally defined by
means of a mathematical model. In the model, the defined
objective function has the goal to minimize the total weighted
tardiness of the package of products acquired by the clients
to be delivered in a specific date. The delivery date of each
Product-Package is conditioned by the latest date established
by each supplier for each product that forms part of the same
one. Besides, having different process times for each prod-
uct and different penalties for each Product-Package, each
supplier can offer a different mix of additional products with
different due date. Due to the complexity of the problem a
Genetic Algorithm has been the approach taken for its reso-
lution. The GA elements and procedures are defined and the
P. Gomez-Gasquet (B) · R. Rodriguez-Rodriguez · R. D. Franco ·
A. Ortiz-Bas
Centro de Investigación de Gestión e Ingeniería de la Producción
(CIGIP), Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Cno. de Vera s/n,
Valencia, Spain
e-mail: pgomez@cigip.upv.es
R. Rodriguez-Rodriguez
e-mail: raurodro@cigip.upv.es
R. D. Franco
e-mail: dfranco@cigip.upv.es
A. Ortiz-Bas
e-mail: aortiz@cigip.upv.es
parameters are tuned. Although the major contribution of this
work focuses on the algorithmic development of a proposal
in the context of operations research that could help to solve
the problem also is discussed the environment in which this
occurs and that justifies our interest. In order to validate the
proposed solutions diverse configurations are presented and
the results obtained by means of the GA and some heuristics
rules are compared.
Keywords Collaborative scheduling · Selling chains ·
Multi-supplier scheduling · Genetic algorithm
Introduction
This paper presents the problem of order management within
extended collaborative selling chains, and an identification of
the objectives, requirements and solutions of scheduling in
this environment. The main issue to be considered in this
context is the production scheduling, whose final goal is to
satisfy the delivery dates agreed with final customers by using
a collaborative strategy among the suppliers.
The scheduling problem presented is not only interesting
from an operational point of view but also from the business
environment in which it occurs. For this reason, this work com-
prises both views. In an Make-to-Order (MTO) environment
where companies can develop a line of business in collabo-
ration with others (collaborative selling) without neglecting
their traditional business and commitments and where such a
collaboration means that several suppliers produce elements
or parts, products for us, that belongs to a single sales unit
named product-package. It should be emphasized that in this
process customers establish deadlines for product-packages,
which, from a productive system point of view, takes us to
decompose such a product-pack into its indivdual products
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that are managed individually. The main difficulty that arises
is how to establish the productive scheduling of all providers
so that each one can deliver the product on time and thus can
meet the delivery date of product-package agreed with the cus-
tomer. From a general point of view, suppliers should also take
into account the scheduling of products that are part of a prod-
uct-package (collaborative selling), being therefore of com-
mon interest, as they might have to be included within their
other products and also picked up from other business line.
Consequently, this problem may easily turn into a sched-
uling problem, where experienced people from the differ-
ent enterprises should take care of carrying out the pertinent
scheduling and re-scheduling of manufacturing orders. The
scheduling problem can be defined as follows: There are n
product-packages each one comprising a maximum of s prod-
ucts. Each product j(s) is available at time zero to be pro-
cessed on one and only one specific supplier s, which can
process at most one product at a time. Each supplier pro-
cesses no more than one product by product-package. Prod-
uct—package j has a processing time p j,s and a due date
d j . The tardiness of product-package j is defined as T j =
max(0; C j −d j )_where C j is the maximum completion time
of product-package j in any supplier, C j = max(C j,s ). The
objective is to determine a job schedule δ such that the total
n
weighted tardiness T δ = j=1 w j T j is minimized. It is
assumed that the processing time of the product-package j in
the supplier s, p j,s, can be 0 in one or more suppliers. In the
particular case in which the p j,s > 0 in only one supplier,
this is a product and not a product-package.
This problem could be extended to a make-to-stock (MTS)
environment, in which the products would be replaced by
batches that would not be exempt from certain restrictions in
the configuration.
The proposed problem is interesting because it is easy to
think of several manufacturers that launch a product pack
to the market and such a product pack becomes a success,
as customers like the extended value proposition obtained
by acquiring it. Then, the system that manages all the order
management process should be run, in every enterprise, by
people able to carry out important scheduling decisions, giv-
ing preference to those product orders that have to do with
such a product pack. Thus, it is possible that an enterprise
decides to reject some new orders to favour the fabrication
of products inside the product pack; or they may even decide
to postpone some other orders already scheduled in order to
re-allocate their manufacturing capacity to manufacture the
new product pack. Anyway, it should be taken into account
that these decisions will affect to the others providers in
the case of product-packages, being also relevant decisions
regarding the remaining products
It is thus possible to conclude that what started as a busi-
ness-related problem (product and product-package) finds
its solution at the most operational layer; namely, by solving
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J Intell Manuf
production scheduling tasks that should be collaboratively
carried out regarding how to properly manage orders. The
novelty of this approach is not in its conception but in its
execution and its linkage to the several collaborative supply
chains.
This paper contains five sections beyond the Introduction.
The following section introduces the trends in supply chains
regarding scheduling approaches; section “An example of
collaborative scheduling in extended selling chains” presents
an example of a collaborative scheduling problem within the
extended selling chains; section “Problem definition” defines
the proposed problem formally; section “A genetic algorithm
for collaborative scheduling within extended selling chains”
describes and studies the proposed GA approach by conduct-
ing an experimental analysis; and the last section concludes
with a short review of the results reached in the research.
Literature review
The issue is interesting because globalization, together with
national, European and worldwide competitiveness, has
promoted the creation and consolidation of the so-called
Extended Enterprises and Collaborative Networked Orga-
nizations, which transcend the single enterprise domain and
build meta-enterprises (Dyer 2000). Basic concepts and con-
siderations have been described in several previous works
(Byrne 1993; Camarinha-Matos et al. 2005,b; Camarinha-
Matos and Afsarmanesh 2005a; Davidow and Malone 1992).
Most of the existing “extended enterprises” (EE) have ini-
tially been focused on reinforcing the links and flows among
the companies that are involved in the same value chain
(Macbeth et al. 1998). However, recently, this phenomenon
has shifted towards the creation of EE which cross the bound-
aries of a single value chain, and link together different com-
plementary value chains thus building extended collaborative
selling chains (ECOSELL domain). Many industrial compa-
nies have desired, or actually achieved, to sell and jointly
distribute their aggregated products for a long time and now
face the challenge of the complete integration of their value
chains (Burton and Boeder 2003). The starting point of any
meta-value chain winning approach is, consequently, collab-
oration, where this concept inherently implies both agility
and learn to learn capacity (Christopher 2003; Kramer and
Tyler 1995; Meier 1995).
Within a value chain, the downstream supply chain, here-
after called selling chain, plays a key role in building and
delivering competitive value to the customers, as it repre-
sents the direct nexus between the value chain and the cus-
tomer. The selling chain focuses on the management of the
orders life cycle, from the initial order placement to the deliv-
ery and provision of physical goods, covering the part of
the value chain that goes from manufacturers to end cus-
tomers (including logistics platforms/operators, distribution,
J Intell Manuf
Fig. 1 Business domains
intermediaries, resellers and retailers). Similarly, the meta-
selling chain (see Fig. 1), defined as the aggregation of selling
chains within a meta-value chain, becomes a key player to
build and deliver competitive extended value propositions to
customers (Putnik and Cunha 2007; Seuring et al. 2003).
These different policies of scheduling, rejecting or post-
poning orders together with others are of high interest within
the production context, as the decisions made will affect the
future performance of the organisations and will delimit their
competitive position. Additionally, there are more factors to
take into account when making both scheduling and global
decisions at the supply chain and the meta-supply chain lev-
els such as human factors, training factors, structural factors,
organisational factors, etc. The coordinated management of
all these factors will result in an integrated approach of the
meta-supply chain and will therefore lead to provide the
desired extended value proposition to customers.
Regarding the scheduling focus, which is precisely to be
addressed here, when addressing total weighted tardiness
with arbitrary processing times situations, there is no hope
 of
finding polynomial algorithms because the problem 1  T j
is NP-Hard (Brucker 2007). Thus it follows that the under-
lying problem keeps, at least, the same level of complexity
when not more.
For classification purposes, it can be said that this problem
is difficult to be classified within in the traditional operations
research. It has not be found any taxonomy which identifies
the problem clearly and specifically, so multiple approaches
for finding alternatives to solve it had to be carried out.
The first and simplest approach is to consider multiple sin-
gle machine scheduling problems, one for each supplier. This
approach is based on a previous solution of the assignment
problem, which in the present case is simple to solve, as it is
considered that there is a single resource available for each
product. One of the techniques employed in these cases is
the application of heuristics such as EWDD (Baker 1995;
Cheng and Sin 1990). However, each problem would be
NP-Hard and it would not take into account the interdepen-
dence among the products forming a product-package. The
consideration of this restriction could significantly improve
the results in our problem.
Other way to approach the proposed problem is to classify
it as a classic problem of parallel machines, where machines
are suppliers. Assuming that processing times are indepen-
dent of the machine/supplier of choice, since there is only
one possibility, one can consider the proposals for identi-
cal, proportional or unrelated machines. In this problem, two
closely related aspects should be solved: the allocation and
sequencing. In this area, several contributions that address
a problem with the objective to minimize weighted tardi-
ness were analyzed (Azizoglu and Kirca 1998; Liaw et al.
2003; Lee and Pinedo 1997; Park 2000; Ko et al. 2004),
as well as those works that consider the machines eligibil-
ity constraint, usually considering makespan and identical
machine constraint (Su 2009; Hu et al. 2010); however, sci-
entific research addressing due date related problems are not
abundant (Sheen and Liao 2007). It should not be of inter-
est how that solves the assignment problem, since this is
not the problem, and it generally increases the complexity.
However, the problems of parallel machine, like those of
single machine, do not take into account interdependenc-
es among the products belonging to a product-package. For
this reason, this approach was considered less interesting than
single machine problem.
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Another interesting apporach is one that addresses produc-
tion batches. One of the major branches in the batch schedul-
ing research area addresses family scheduling models (Baker
1995; Potts and Kovalyov 2000). In family scheduling mod-
els, jobs are clustered into families according to their simi-
larity, so as to reduce setup times. No setup is required for
a job if it belongs to the same family of the job previously
processed. Two variants are studied within the family sched-
uling models depending on when the jobs become available.
In a family model with batch availability Kim et al. (2003)
provides a two-level batch scheduling heuristic (TH) that
is applied where jobs in the same batch can be distributed
to several different machines. It overcomes the main diffi-
culty found when family models are analyzed, that is, usu-
ally job that belongs to batches is processed in the same
machine. A family scheduling model with batch availabil-
ity for parallel machine as is very close but their approach
does not provide a fundamental restriction on the problem
raised: machine eligibility. In this approach, each job (prod-
uct for us) is free to be allocated to any resource while the
problem proposed respect and keep an earlier assignment.
In any case, it is necessary to take into account the fact that
it is all the works’ completion the one that influences the
objective function, and not when the individual completion
date.
According to the analysis, it seems interesting to provide
a new focus when designing the method of solving the prob-
lem. Then, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) will be implemented.
GAs are usually a suitable tool for scheduling problems and
an specific GA will be designed to overcome the gaps found
in the approaches of the single machine problem and the
family scheduling model.
Tiles
Supplier
ORDER PLANNING
ECOSELL
Environment
Ecosell Platform
Furniture
Supplier
Fig. 2 Actors involved in the collaborative environment
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J Intell Manuf
An example of collaborative scheduling in extended
selling chains
The Sales Network is composed of several selling points
which are used as storefronts of the ECOSELL environment.
When a customer asks for a product-package this is selected
and the final delivery date is arranged, and then all involved
actors receive the information needed to fulfil the order.
Figure 2 represents an example, which is extended in Gomez-
Gasquet et al. (2009), where the product-package is a bath-
room composition (tiles + furniture) and where the actors are
named logistic operators, tiles and furniture suppliers.
The process starts when a final customer walks into a sell-
ing point and identifies a set of products that constitute a
product-pack for his bathroom. Such items must be deliv-
ered and installed at the customer’s house in a specified due
date. The products could be available in stock or a replenish-
ment supply could be needed. If enough stock does not exist,
the corresponding manufacturer should provide an alterna-
tive and suitable delivery date; i.e., a date that allows to the
seller to install the product-pack in the date desired by the
client. The process shown involves several selling chains and
is identified as the ECOSELL environment.
Once the order has been sent, the suppliers can have a
numerical situation like the one shown in the Table 1. It can
be seen that there are 2 product-package (PP-1 and PP-2) and
two products (P-1 and P-2) remaining to be scheduled on the
Tile Supplier and the same for the Furniture Supplier with
other two products (P-3 and P-4).
To simplify the data structure, all items have arisen as
a product-package, and there is only one due date and one
time-slot penalty for delay per item. The difference between
Items/Package
Logistic Operator
POS
Orders
ORDER SCHEDULING
POS
ORDER MONITORING Customer
POS
Items
Sales
Network
Logistic Operator
J Intell Manuf

Table 1 Basic data for scheduling example

PP-1 PP-2 P-1 P-2 P-3 P-4

Due date (dd j ) 30 60 5 55 30 60

Weight (w j ) 25 20 5 10 5 10
Process time ( p j,1 ) 10 20 10 30 0 0
tiles supplier
Process time ( p j,2 ) 25 15 0 0 5 20
furniture supplier

Fig. 4 Schedule reached using modified dd j /w j sorting

involved because all of them may have heterogeneous

Fig. 3 Schedule reached using dd j /w j sorting
a product and a product-package is determined by that in the
first case, all processing times are 0 except for a single sup-
plier. The goal is to find that scheduling in which the total
weighted tardiness be as low as possible. A schedule could
be the one carried out without applying any kind of rule, i.e.
sequencing in Tile supplier p-1, pp-1, pp-2, pp3 and in Fur-
niture supplier p-3, p-4, pp-1 pp-2, reaching a penalty of 775
whereas an alternative scheduling (sort ascending the prod-
ucts each supplier based on the result dd j /w j ) is shown in
Fig. 3, in which the penalty reaches a total of 350, signifi-
cantly better than the first approach.
However, it seems natural that applying a logical rule will
output better results. The important thing issue is to realize
that an improvement in the objective function can help to
improve the degree of collaboration among suppliers avoid-
ing that inappropriate action from a supplier affected others.
In this sense, we can see how a small change in the rule used
in the second case, consisting of exchanging the item PP-2
and P-3 (see Fig. 4) in the sequence of furniture supplier,
reduces the penalty, and thus prevents the product—package
2 which had already been completed by the supplier Tile is
scheduling systems.
– Interdependencies between production processes which
are performed at different plants must be considered.
– Existing (local) scheduling systems for individual plants
that accomplish the local realisation in term of service of
global requirements should be integrated.
– The process of scheduling could be performed on-line as
customers are requesting orders or could be executed off-
line after several requests have been consolidated. In any
case, it should be assumed that there is a time-horizon
in which orders for each supplier are uncertain because
they are subject to change. Obviously, it is not possiblt to
assume that this is the whole time-horizon.
At this point, it should be understood the complexity of the
problem as a whole. From this section, concentrating efforts
in scheduling problem abstracting a little environment where
this occurs.
Problem definition
The problem defined in the Introduction (paragraph 1), con-
sisting in minimizing the sum of the total weighted tardiness
in selling chains where orders are processed in parallel in a
single stage, and where such requests are made by product-
packages, can be formally expressed as follows:
Objective Function

n

waiting longer than necessary. Min w j Tj

j=1
This scenario presents a set of characteristics that
increases considerably the complexity of its modelling such Index
as:
j, i = 1 to n indexes on product-package set.
– Companies must work cooperatively to properly coordi- s = 1 to S index on supplier set.
nate common scheduling activities from all the suppliers t = 1 to H index on time-slot with horizon in H.

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Data with an Intel Pentium 4, 3 GHz, 2 GB of memory. It was tested

with a dozen product-packages and the optimal outcome is
ps, j >= 0 processing time of product-package j in not feasible in a realistic environment because several hours
supplier s. were needed to reach a solution.
dj > 0 due date of product-package j.
wj > 0 weight of penalty of product-package j.
M denote a very large and positive number. A genetic algorithm for collaborative scheduling
within extended selling chains
Decision variables
This section proposes a new GA in order to cope with the
presented problem in a reasonable time, as described in the
xs, j,t 1 if operations starts in t-th instant on product-
previous section, and for a realistic size. The key features of
package j in supplier s, 0 otherwise.
the algorithm will be described, the process of adjusting its
c j,t 1 if last operation (in all suppliers) on product-
parameters will be discussed, and an experimental analysis
package j was finished in instant t −1, 0 otherwise.
that allows to compare the results obtained with the GA and
Tj Tardiness of product-package j. T j >= 0.
with some heuristic rules discussed in the section on literature
review will be presented.
Subject to:


H Definition
xs, j,t = 1 for all s, j (1)
t=1 Genetic algorithms (Holland 1975) have been known to offer
tt<t+ ps, j
   significant advantages over conventional methods because
xs,i,tt ≤ M ∗ 1 − xs, j,t they are able to use several search principles and methods
tt=t simultaneously. Nevertheless, GAs can suffer from slow con-
for all s, j, i, t/j = i and t ≤ H − Ps, j (2) vergence and premature convergence before providing an

H accurate solution because of their fundamental limitations;
c j,t = 1 for all j (3) namely, not exploiting local search information. To improve
t=1 the weaknesses of not exploiting the local search information

H 
H in GAs, various heuristic methodologies of GAs combined
∗
ps, j + (t xs, j,t ) ≤ (t ∗ c j,t ) for all s, j (4) with conventional heuristics have been developed.
t=1 t=1 In order to find a good solution, it uses a rare population
S tt<t+
 ps, j structure and rules for the interpretation of solutions specif-
xs, j,tt− ps, j −1 ≤ S − c j,t for all j, t > 1 (5) ically designed for the problem. Two operators have been
s=1 tt≥ ps, j selected according with the genetic representation of solu-

H tions to cover the crossover and mutation. We will explain
Tj ≥ (t ∗ c j,t ) − d j for all j (6) these genetic operators and other basic elements of the pro-
t=1 posed GA in the following sections.

H
Tj ≥ d j − (t ∗ c j,t ) for all j (7) Genetic representation and population structure
t=1

Equation 1 states that there must be one and only one
time-slot of initiation for each product regardless of the sup-
plier from which to start the operation. Equation 2 prevents
that two or more products are processed in the same supplier
simultaneously. Equation 3 states that there must be one and
only one moment of completion of operations for each prod-
uct-package. The usage of Eqs. 4 and 5 assures that the date
of completion of an operation should be exactly ps, j time-
slots after its starts (not pre-emptive). And the Eqs. 6 and 7
are used to calculate T j as the maximum value between 0
and C j − d j .
After modeling the problem, it starts the resolution of sim-
ple cases with only 2 suppliers MPL using CPLEX v 4.11
Figure 5 shows the genetic representation of a solution for 10
product-packages (i.e., chromosome). The chromosome con-
sists of a product-package sequence. In this case, the prod-
uct-package sequence is 2, 3, 9, 7, 8, 1, 10, 6, 4, 5. To obtain
a schedule from this representation, it is necessary to apply
a rule to convert it into a sequence by each supplier and also
consider the timing. In this case the allocation of products,
which are part of product-package, to suppliers are unique
and therefore not a problem but a fact. This rule is an impor-
tant element and different alternatives have been proposed.
Figure 6 shows the proposed structure of the population.
This was designed by Zhong et al. (2004) and it clearly con-
tributes to local fight and a more intensive and expansive dis-

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Fig. 5 Chromosome corresponding with the genetic representation
proposed
Fig. 6 Structure of population
tribution of the genetic knowledge accumulated. As it shown,
it has got a square matrix structure where each cell, which
is occupied by an individual, is characterized by its chromo-
some and the value of the evaluation function, which in this
case is the total weighted tardiness. In this matrix only indi-
viduals relate to their 4 neighbours (left, right, up and down).
In our experiment the matrix has been established with a size
of 10 × 10.
Rules: from sequence to schedule
To convert a sequence of product-packages in a Schedule for
each supplier the following 2 rules were applied:
Rule 1. Each supplier process each product as soon as pos-
sible following a common sequence for all sup-
pliers, the product-package sequence. The product
order is those has been assigned to the product-
package that they belong to.
Rule 2. Each supplier’s products are processed as close as
possible to the due date (see Fig. 7) and the prod-
ucts are placed by following the sequence of the
product-package and using the position assigned
to the product-package that they belong to. When
a product attempts to settle at a position which is
wholly or partially occupied by another product, it
then first try to move the product that was previ-
ously located in this position to the left (compact-
ing); if this movement does not create the necessary
space to be allocated without generating tardiness,
the new product will be placed in the position clos-
Fig. 7 Application of rule 2
est to the right of the due date where space is avail-
able. It is important to point out that none product
with a specific (worse) position in the sequence can
cause that a product with a better position, and pre-
viously located, creates or increases the tardiness
of the last one.
A rf (rule factor) is used to select either rule 1 or rule 2.
Generation of population
The initial population is generated creating a percentage
equal to gf (generation factor) of individuals that are cre-
ated using a heuristics; other individual chromosomes are
created randomly.
The heuristic rules that can be used are known as earliest
weighted due date (EWDD) modified from EDD (Jackson
1995) and EDD properly. EWDD consists on ascending the
order of the product-package based on the result of the oper-
ation d j ∗ U j . U j is a value between 1 and Vmin > 0.5, so
that Vmin is assigned to the product-package with the highest
w j and 1 is assigned to the product-package with the lowest
w j . The remaining being distributed between the two val-
ues in proportion to the value of w j . EWDD heuristic can
apply Rule 1 or 2 for the interpretation of the sequence. A hf
(heuristic factor) is used to select either EWDD or EDD.
Selection, crossover and mutation
The algorithm does not maintain the classic concept of iter-
ation in the proposed GA an iteration it is to go over every
single individual in the array. For each of the individuals a
genetic operation has been performed as follows:
Step 1. The individual X is randomly selected, which has a
percentage cf (crossover factor) of being selected
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for crossover operation. If selected go to step 2
(crossover) else go to step 5 (mutation).
Step 2. We analyze the evaluation value of the 4 neighbours
of the individual X, selecting the individual that has
lower value. Go to step 3.
Step 3. It makes the crossing between the individual X and
Y using the method Similar Block 2-point Order
Crossover (SB2OX) (Ruiz et al. 2006), which are
obtained by 2 subjects children to replace the indi-
vidual candidate X. Go to step 4
Step 4. The individual X with an assessment value Vx is
replaced by the child with a lower assessment value
Vx y if and only if Vx y < af * Vx . af (approach fac-
tor) parameter is set at 1.05, and it allows the X
individual to renew the chromosome if the child is
better or even as much as 5% worse. Select a new
X individual and go to step 1.
Step 5. The individual X is randomly selected, which has
a percentage mf (mutation factor) of being selected
for mutation operation. If selected go to step 6
(mutation) else select a new individual and go to
step 1.
Step 6. It runs along the X chromosome and each allele
of the individual is swapped with the next with a
probability mf. Once all the individual alleles have
been considered, the mutation process is completed
obtaining a mutated X’ chromosome. Go to step
7.
Step 7. The individual X with an assessment value Vx is
replaced by the mutated one with an assessment
value Vx  if and only if Vx  < af * Vx . Using af
parameter as in the crossover process. Select a new
X individual and go to step 1.
Regeneration and finish condition
The algorithm continues running until a solution with a value
of 0, which is the best one, is found, or until it reaches an
established iteration, in this case 5.000. However, in order
to avoid to conider a local optimum, a regeneration sys-
tem of the population has been established. This consists in
verifying whether the value that corresponds to the best
solution has remained unimproved uf times (unimproved
factor) and, if so, the population is modified as follows:
If an individual has a value Vx that is larger that the
value of the best solution multipled by the approach factor,
af * Vb , is replaced by a new one, but is replaced with
a probability of 70%. Obviously the best solution is never
replaced.
The new individuals are obtained by applying the same
method, as it was done in the initial generation of the popu-
lation.
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Other approaches
In order to compare the results obtained with the proposed
GA, some heuristics, which have proved efficient in sim-
ilar cases, have been implemented. In particular, we have
adapted to this problem two versions of the heuristic Process-
ing Weighted Shortest Time (SWPT) to which we have called
SWPT-PP (SWPT-Product-Package) and SWPT-P (SWPT-
Product) due to SWPT has been applied in two different
ways. The already mentioned EWDD heuristics, and a rule
randomly (RANDOM) used as reference and iterated as GA.
EWDD is the most commonly used in single machine when
the objective is to minimize the total weighted tardiness.
EWDD and RANDOM can employ either Rule 1 or 2 for
the interpretation of the sequence.
Although the SWPT rule is the best and the most com-
monly used dispatching rule when the objective is to mini-
mize the total weighted flow-time, some carried out test have
achieved better results than with EWDD. This rule applies
ascending sorting of items based on the result of the operation
p j /w j . As in the case shown there is no single process time
for each product-package two strategies have been used. The
heuristic SWPT-PP is to generate a single sequence of prod-
uct-package, on the processing time of each product-pack-
age that corresponds with the highest among their products.
The heuristic SWPT-P is to generate a different sequence for
each supplier, considering directly in this case the processing
time of the product that corresponds to each product-pack-
age. When using SWPT-PP heuristic then rule 1 or 2 provided
for the interpretation of the sequence could be used. And if it
employs heuristics SWPT-P then rule 1 is used for the inter-
pretation of the sequence. It makes no sense to use rule 2
since it is the traditional application of the rule SWPT.
It was also considered to use the TH rule, mentioned in
the literature review, but after studying their adaptation to this
problem it was observed that this was reduced to a EWDD
and it was therefore discarded.
Experimental study
This study is based on the production data obtained from a
semi-real case used in the ECOSELL project environment
(European Commission GRD1-2001-40692, Extended Col-
laborative Selling Chain). The processing time for each prod-
uct depends on the supplier assigned, and it is generated from
U[10,20] (slot time unit). We found that the variations of the
processing times do not affect our experimental results.
Due dates of jobs are integer values generated from
U[MK(1−τ −ρ/2), MK(1−τ +ρ/2)], as suggested by (Potts
and Van Wassenhove 1982) and used in (Kim et al. 2003).
MK, τ , and ρ control makespan, priority factor, and due date
range factor, respectively. Because MK cannot be calculated
accurately, it is estimated to be the maximum value of sum
J Intell Manuf

Table 2 Relative average total weighted tardiness

Suppliers Product- Due-date loose (L) Due-date tight (T)
package
EWDD GA SWPT-P SWPT-PP EWDD GA SWPT-P SWPT-PP

2 10 2.02 0.92 3.61 3.04 2.09 0.89 4.47 3.58

20 1.70 0.86 2.43 2.00 1.92 0.81 3.17 2.09
30 1.34 0.55 3.54 2.81 1.50 0.48 4.17 3.03
4 10 1.6 0.87 3.54 2.65 1.82 0.80 5.17 3.83
20 1.51 0.61 4.42 3.30 1.72 0.61 5.54 3.69
30 1.82 0.52 3.84 2.71 1.62 0.47 5.21 3.27
8 10 3.07 0.77 8.58 5.64 2.19 0.85 5.04 3.14
20 2.06 0.65 4.56 2.70 1.50 0.66 5.13 2.58
30 1.80 0.47 6.43 3.75 1.77 0.50 6.16 3.51

processing time of each supplier for a product-package. ρ is
fixed to be 0.6, and τ is 0.6 (tight: T) and 0.5 (loose: L).
Underlining the urgency, other factor to analyze is the
number of items that each supplier receives. In this experi-
ment it should be interpreted as if it indicates a certain load,
for example, 10 product-packages, that means that the 50%
of load that each supplier must process, 5 items in the exam-
ple, are part of equal number of product-package and the rest,
and other 5 items are standalone products that do not belong
to any product-package.
Four heuristics have been examined, namely the EWDD,
SWPT-PP. SWPT-P, and RANDOM, besides the designed
GA. As mentioned later on, some data pre-treatment pro-
cesses were performed with non-deterministic methods in
order to unify the amount and type of data, and likewise
the calibration was also performed. Five combinations of the
number of suppliers (SP = 2, 4, 8), the number of Product-
Packages (PP = 10, 20, 30) and due dates (τ = T(0.6), L(0.5))
are considered, which implies 5 × 3 × 3 × 2 = 90 sce-
narios. Thus, considering five algorithms, we ran a total of
5 × 90 = 450 treatments. Algorithms were written in .NET,
and an Intel Pentium 4, 3 GHz, 2 GB of memory was used to
perform these computations.
In order to simplify the final analysis refers to data from
the 540 mentioned treatments, some actions were carried out.
First, before executing the experiment described in the pre-
ceding paragraphs, a study of the behavior of GA in a similar
environment that the one described with several levels in fac-
tors as cf (50%, 20%), mf (10%, 5%), gf (30.10), uf (200,
50), rf (1.2) and hf (EWDD, EDD) was performed. The GA
calibration process concluded with the establishment of the
following values cf = 20%, mf = 5%, gf = 30, uf = 50, rf = 2
and hf = EWDD. Second, during the execution of the exper-
iment, there were 10 replicates for methods RANDOM and
GA, as they are nondeterministic procedures. In addition, the
heuristics EWDD, RANDOM and SWPT-PP were analyzed
for the case of using Rule 1 or 2 for the interpretation of
the solutions. At the end, in the final analysis we only used
data for the average of 10 replicates, and also in the case of
EWDD, RANDOM and SWPT-PP only select data from the
experiment that uses Rule 1 as it proved to be the best.
Table 2 summarizes the relative performance of all the five
methods. The relative performance is computed by dividing
the average TWT of each method by the average TWT of
RANDOM. Thus, the ratio indicates the deviation from the
solution produced by RANDOM
The results show that the GA clearly provides the best
solution in all the cases, whereas SWPT-P provides the lower
bound. It was observed that none of the heuristics used in the
problems that traditionally have been considered closer to
the proposed in the paper, can be considered valid because
they are always worse than the RANDOM rule. This shows,
firstly, that the proposed GA is an acceptably good solution to
the problem analyzed, and, secondly, that there are not ade-
quate tools to deal with this problem as necessary yet. The
statistical significance of performance between methods is
analyzed by using ANOVA over a TWT transformation by
means of a logarithm (LOG).
Regarding the CPU times consumed by the different meth-
ods, there are no relevant findings. It has been observed that
the GA is generally the slowest of all, as assumed on the basis
of complexity. The heuristic rules are more than 100% faster
on average.
The ANOVA table decomposes the variability of LOG
(TWT) into contributions due to various factors. Since 8
P-values are less than 0,05, these factors have a statistically
significant effect on LOG (TWT) at the 95,0% confidence
level. However, the most important effect for this experi-
ment is related to the methods used. In this sense, the main
effect of the Method factor confirms the results discussed
on Table 2. Finally, as shown in Fig. 8, in relation to the
interactions between factor Method and other factors, noted
in the ANOVA as the DD factor, related to the urgency of
the product-package, it is not significant and therefore there

123
 J Intell Manuf

Table 3 Analysis of variance

for LOG(TWT)—type III sums Source Sum of squares Df Mean square F-ratio P-value
of squares
MAIN EFFECTS
A:DD 0.0695979 1 0.0695979 0.46 0.4963
B:SP 69.9132 2 34.9566 232.90 0.0000
C:PP 294.386 2 147.193 980.67 0.0000
D:Method 237.233 4 59.3081 395.14 0.0000
INTERACTIONS
AB 3.06485 2 1.53243 10.21 0.0000
AC 2.28554 2 1.14277 7.61 0.0006
AD 0.268314 4 0.0670785 0.45 0.7747
BC 5.46099 4 1.36525 9.10 0.0000
BD 3.3767 8 0.422088 2.81 0.0048
CD 3.68663 8 0.460828 3.07 0.0023
All F-ratios are based on the RESIDUAL 61.8392 412 0.150095
residual mean square error TOTAL (CORRECTED) 681.584 449

Interaction Plot Interaction Plot

12,7 Method 14,1
Method
EWDD
12,2 EWDD
GA 13,1 GA
RANDOM
RANDOM
LOG(TWT)

SWPT-P
LOG(TWT)

11,7
SWPT-PP 12,1 SWPT-P
SWPT-PP
11,2
11,1
10,7

10,2 10,1

9,7 9,1
2 4 8 10 20 30
SP PP

Fig. 8 Interaction between factor Method and SP factor Fig. 9 Interaction between factor Method and PP factor

is not influence on the selection the method used. However,

although both interactions Method-Method-SP and Method-
PP are significant, it is only interesting the behavior of the
GA in the latter interaction. It also notes that the interaction
PP-Method GA stabilizes the TWT, and it does not grow
proportionally as the number of product-package increases
to 30. This change in the trend of the line represents that
the GA suggests that, in situations of any complexity, it can
increase further its efficiency with the rest.
Conclusions
This paper presents the results of a study seeking to minimize
TWT of a product-package scheduling within Extended Sell-
ing Chains. The problem of operations with sets of products
that form a single family sales or product-package compli-
cates the scheduling problem even in a situation where it is
not considered dependent set-up or processing time, only one
transaction per supplier. The dependence between the opera-
tions of elements (product) that belong to a single deliverable
(product-package) is the essence and the main difficulty of
the problem, and it is rarely mentioned/treated within the
academic literature.
EWDD, SWPT-P and SWPT-PP were outperformed by
the GA, providing the lower bound for the given problem.
This might be due to the fact that they focus on the prod-
uct-package sequencing only and not on the product level
sequencing. The GA produced a fairly good solution in a
few seconds. It worked especially well when the problem
size was more than 20 product-packages per supplier. Thus,
the GA can be used as a handy tool for the practical appli-
cations of the collaborative scheduling in Extended Selling
Chains such as automotive or bathroom or kitchen composi-
tions retailers.
Further research would include the comparison of the pro-
posed heuristics with some other heuristics discussed in the

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J Intell Manuf
existing literature. Another interesting effort can be made to
extend the GA.
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