Supply Chain Operations Planning with Setup Times and Multi Period Capacity Consumption

Developing an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve a supply chain operations planning model is the main purpose of this paper. The model considers multi period supply chain planning with capacitated resources. The concept of multi period capacity consumption has been developed recently at the context of supply chain management that realizes resource planning at a supply chain. Because of considering setup times and costs, the model contains binary variables. Since the mixed integer model is strongly NP-hard problem and finding a feasible solution is NP-complete, developing an efficient algorithm is remarkable. In this paper a heuristic algorithm is developed to solve this complicated model. Two reasons encouraged the authors to solve this complex problem. First, the model is an advanced and applicable operations planning model at the supply chain environment. Second, this model is strongly NPhard. So it is of important task to develop a solution for the problem to be capable of feasible and efficient.