Distributed supply-chain project rescheduling: Part i - Impacts of information-sharing strategies

Abstract

A supply-chain project normally involves a number of independent and autonomous enterprises that share information to varying levels. The initial project schedule (preschedule) established at the time of forming the supply-chain often requires a series of amendments due to unexpected or abrupt disturbances such as temporary resource outage (e.g. machine break), arrival or cancellation of orders from customers, and change in an operation's processing time (e.g. rework). Rescheduling or adaptive scheduling is a process of updating/repairing the preschedule to adapt to the disturbances. Appropriate rescheduling methods must be chosen and applied depending on the specific protocol of sharing information agreed between the enterprises in the supply chain. This paper is concerned with the impacts of different levels of information sharing on the performance of supply-chain project rescheduling problems. Three rescheduling methods are examined in the research. They are distributed AOR (Affected Operations Rescheduling), negotiation-based rescheduling (NEG), and centralized total rescheduling (TR). These three rescheduling algorithms represent three typical information-sharing scenarios: little information sharing, limited information sharing and complete information sharing, respectively. A comprehensive computational study is conducted under different experimental settings. The results show that NEG and distAOR outperforms the TR rescheduling in terms of total cost minimization and stability of schedule and contractual relationship. NEG is superior in both rescheduling efficiency and effectiveness due to the effect of a moderate level of information sharing.