Transportation efforts in distributed manufacturing environments

Large manufacturing companies often manage a network of multiple factories, creating distributed scheduling problems. These problems involve assigning jobs to one of several distributed factories and sequencing the jobs within their designated factories. However, planning in distributed environments also requires the transport of jobs to factories. These transports are usually neglected in the existing planning approaches but can significantly impact the generated plans. We analyze the impact of transportation concerning classical scheduling objectives and environmental objectives such as emissions and energy consumption. Furthermore, inter-factory transports of intermediate goods are analyzed.