Joint Subcontracting and Scheduling Decisions

In this chapter, we discuss centralized supply chain scheduling problems that involve an in-house processing facility and one or more subcontractors by which jobs can also be processed. The decision maker needs to determine jointly a subset of jobs to be subcontracted and a schedule for the jobs processed in-house, and in some situations may also need to construct a schedule for the subcontracted jobs. We discuss several representative problems, and for each problem considered, we study its complexity and describe exact or heuristic solution algorithms, analyze the performance of these algorithms, and present relevant practical insights.