Flexible Assembly Flowshop Scheduling with Batch Delivery Based on Analysis Target Cascading

This paper addresses an integrated scheduling problem for production and distribution in a flexible assembly flowshop, which involves multiple stages of processing, partial assembly, final assembly, and distribution. An integer programming model is established with the optimization objective of minimizing the total cost, including finished product inventory cost, distribution batch cost, and order delay cost. This model not only involves hierarchical coupling constraints between assembly related components in the product structure, but also considers the demand for consolidated shipping between different orders at the same address. Considering the difficulty of directly solving large-scale problems with such a model, we innovatively decompose the overall model into three-layer sub-models focusing on stages of final assembly and distribution, partial assembly and processing. Then, efficient coordination and optimization of each sub-model are achieved based on the analysis target cascading method. Several test cases demonstrate that the proposed decomposition and coordinated solution method outperforms both the overall model and intelligent algorithms.