Ngoc-Hien Do

This paper analyzed a job shop scheduling problem with combinatorial priority rule from a case study of a furniture company, whose product – cupboard – has the highest volume and revenue while it is struggling with tardiness at about 10%. The goal of this scheduling is to minimize the mean flow time, mean tardiness time and the proportion of tardy jobs and compare its performance to one traditional priority rule – Longest Processing Time first. As results, the combinatorial priority rules in scheduling would bring a positive outcome with reducing mean flow time and around 3.45% for proportion of tardy jobs. Moreover, the most significant improvement is true for mean tardiness time, which is reduced by over 3 times compared to Longest Processing Time first alternative. This combinatorial priority rule is recommended to schedule in flexibly ways according to the customer’s demand. It should be considered to use as the initial alternative for the improvement search algorithms to find out better solutions.

Vaccines are biological products containing a weakened, inactivated part of bacteria or viruses that are not harmful to the human body. Vaccine manufacturers and distributors should always store vaccines at the right temperature. To do this task, manufacturers and distributors need to manage cold supply chains to the required standards. Cold chain management helps manufacturers control and keep vaccines at the right temperature while ensuring quality and extending their expiration date. That will help businesses in the medical industry reduce economic losses, avoid waste, and bring more significant benefits to patients. The selection and evaluation process for logistics suppliers, especially those who deal with low-temperature storage, considers many factors to reduce the potential waste of products from poor storage strategies. The author introduces an integrated approach to solve such a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem based on the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) model and an Interactive and Multi-criteria Decision-Making in Portuguese Model (TODIM) model methods under the fuzzy linguistic environment. In this work, the SF-AHP method derives criteria weights in the first stage, and then a TODIM method is presented to identify the ranking of logistics providers. Finally, the authors present a case study on the evaluation and selection of cold chain logistics suppliers to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed fuzzy MCDM model.