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This study addresses the scheduling of supply chain with interrelated factories containing suppliers and manufacturers. These elements of the chain are positioned in series and thus the efficient design of the link among them would insure good performance of the whole. In this paper, jobs transportation among factories and also delivery to the customer can be performed by batch of jobs. The capacity of each batch is limited and the cost per batch delivery is fixed and independent of the number of jobs in the batch. Thus decision should be made on the number of batches, assignment of each job to a batch and also production and delivery scheduling of batches in each factory. The problem scrutinization is on the tradeoff between minimizing transportation cost and tardiness cost. A branch and bound method for solving this problem is presented. A lower bound and a standalone heuristic which is used as an upper bound are also introduced. Computational tests are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia most manufacturing firms are force to make at least two kinds of location decisions, one involving the merits of the six capital cities, and the other based on variables operating inside the metropolitan areas. This paper is concerned with the behavior of the individual manufacturing firm when making the letter decision; empirical data have been obtained from three case study areas in Sydney. There is purposeful economic behavior by firms in locating, the most important influences being closeness to product market and the cost of land. The spatial effect is an arrangement of manufacturers strongly oriented to the CBD and to centrally located transport terminals. In a theoretical context, the neglect of rent considerations is a serious weakness in traditional manufacturing locating theory. The growing ability of firms to substitute among production factors also has important locational effects.