29Research on Multiobjective Coordinated Scheduling Problems for DMEs
from the practical production situation in industry. Thus, how to
extend research on the specic problems to bring them much closer to
the real situation is another future research topic of great signicance.
4. Research on the production scheduling problems in a supply chain
has focused mostly on model building, with little breakthrough on
the solution methods. Most researchers used existing or simple algo-
rithms, such as exact algorithms, heuristic algorithms, and so forth,
to solve small-size problems. However, small-batch and multitype
features are two of the most important characteristics of DMEs, and
thus the problems are usually of a large size. Effective algorith ...