Esaignani Selvarajah and George Steiner

Approximation Algorithms for the

Supplier's Supply Chain SchedulingProblem to Minimize Delivery and
Inventory Holding Costs
Operations Research, March-April 2009; 57: 426 - 438. 

We study the upstream supplier's batch scheduling problem in a supply chain, which was defined

by Hall and Potts [Hall, N. G., C. N. Potts. 2003.Supply chain scheduling: Batching
and delivery. Oper. Res. 51(4) 566–584]. The supplier has to manufacture multiple products and
deliver them to customers in batches. There is an associated delivery cost with each batch.  The
objective of the supplier is to minimize the total inventory  holding and delivery costs. We present
simple approximation  algorithms for this strongly NP-hard problem, which find a solution  that is
guaranteed to have a cost at most 3/2 times the minimum.  We also prove that the approximation
algorithms have worst-case bounds that vary parametrically with the data and that for
realistic parameter values are much better than 3/2. The theoretical results  are also supported by
the findings of a computational study.