Optimal spare parts production-distribution scheduling considering operational utility on customer equipment

Integrated scheduling of production and distribution is conducive to saving transportation cost and improving customer satisfaction. However, in previous related literature, no optimization objective has been set to intui-tively reflect the influence of the scheduling scheme on the customer side, ignoring the fact that: 1) the pro-duction and distribution of spare parts directly affect the performance of operation and maintenance and further affect the operational utility of customer equipment; 2) the delivery time of spare parts has a positive effect on optimizing the operational utility of customer equipment corresponding to the delayed spare parts. To fill this gap, in the paper, we construct an optimal spare parts production scheduling model integrating logistics dis-tribution in flowshop environment, in which equipment operation utility on the customer side is set as an optimization objective and a speed adjustment strategy is introduced, so that the manufacturer can adjust the operation strategy of the equipment corresponding to the delayed spare parts and guide the equipment operation and maintenance in the customer side. There are two objectives in our model. The first is to maximize equipment operational utility on the customer side, and the second is to minimize the total cost on the manufacturing side. To solve the problem, a three-layer hybrid coding memetic algorithm (THMA) is constructed. Two initial heu-ristics, respectively named Heuristics 1 and Heuristics 2, are constructed. Two local search operators operated respectively on the production and distribution stages of spare parts are constructed. By performing extensive contrast experiments, the superiority of THMA and the effectiveness of all the above operators are verified.