A collaborative scheduling model for production and transportation of ready-mixed concrete

Ready-mixed-concrete (RMC) is an important green and clean building material which is widely used in modern civil engineering. For the large-scale planar foundations of urban public buildings, huge amounts of RMC need to be continuously delivered to the construction site according to strict time windows, which brings the problem of multi-plants collaborative supply. In this paper, considering transportation capacity, initial setting time, and interrupt pumping time, a collaborative scheduling model for production and transportation of RMC with the objective of minimizing the penalty cost of interruption pumping and vehicle waiting time and fuel consumption cost was established. According to the characteristics of the problem, a double chromosome synchronous evolution genetic algorithm was designed. Finally, the model and algorithm proposed in the paper were verified by data experiments. The computing results showed that in two cases of different scenarios, such as ordinary constructions and emergency constructions, the proposed scheduling model can save 18.6 and 24.8% cost respectively. The scheduling model and algorithm proposed in the paper can be applied directly to improve the operational efficiency of RMC supply chain.