A routing problem in global production planning

The paper proposes an integrated approach for global production planning of production, transportation, and sales problems wherein transportation routing must be optimized simultaneously. Multi-market, multi-product, multi-plant, and multi-path frameworks comprise the research contexts. The objective of this study is to determine how to maximize total profit with path-selection of marine transportation. Products are transported from plants to markets by marine shippers that are business partners of the manufacturer. Unit production costs from each plant to each market are not constant in this study, changing according to transportation path, and discount policy on each liner. Since the proposed model is a nonlinear problem with a nonconvex objective function and has nonlinear constraints, the model was linearized into a mixed-integer linear problem so that it could be solved with an optimization solver. moreover, computational experiments were conducted. the findings show that, because of transportation routing influences production allocation and sales operations, the proposed integrated approach is proven to be effective at increasing total profit and can be used as a decision support tool to aid global manufacturers to contract with transportation booking companies.