# Multi-Objective Production Scheduling of Perishable Products in Agri-Food Industry
## 1 Introduction  
The agri-food industry is highly dependent on changing consumer habits around the world and different international regulations. They must evolve themselves in terms of employment: workforce, qualification structure, skills, etc. Furthermore, globalization along with rapid demographic changes and evolving regulatory and legislative interventions dictate the increasing demand for high quality, value-added, and customized agri-food products for multitudes of finished products. Production requires efficient planning [1] to minimize costs in order to maximize profit generation while meeting the customer demand. Thus, an agri-food industry should have an efficient method for balancing customer demands and production decisions in order to optimize the inventory level [2, 3].  
Faced with those challenges, the evolution of this type of industries depends essentially on multiple strategies. The most important one concerns the company's choices regarding organization of work, and coordination between functional and operational positions. This strategy has often been considered very important and even decisive for the majority of agri-food companies [4]. In this category of the industry, the quality changes imposed by the perishability phenomenon is noticeable by the entity receiving the products during the planning horizon. That is why some companies have made an effort to automate their manufacturing lines in order to better organize and control the flow of products [5, 6]. Unlike other industrial products, agri-food products have a finite lifespan, with end-of-manufacturing dates. Each finished product is then associated with a consumption limit date. It should be noted that the sale of these products often passes through distribution areas that impose certain conditions on manufacturers, with the product being considered unsellable from a certain period before its expiry date [7]. The production planner must then take account those criteria, considering production delays and resource capacities [8, 9, 10]. In this context, the design, development, and operation of an efficient agri-food supply chain have begun to be met with increased interest in modern managementscience [11; 12]. The volatility of weather conditions, the complex food safety regulatory environment, the environmental concerns, and the plethora of stakeholders involved are then considered [13]. In particular, the uncertainty of the customer demands about the finished products with changing consumers' lifestyle trends, the perishability of products, the production and distribution delays, and the constraints on production and storage capacities pose real, significant challenges towards the development of efficient and robust agri-food supply chains [14; 15; 16; 17]. In this work, an exact method is applied; this is the Branch and Bound method and two approximate methods are also used--Algorithm Genetic [18] and Ant Colony Optimization [19]--to optimize the scheduling and the number of expired products. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the state-of-the-art solutions to the scheduling and optimization problem under disruptions is given in Section 2. Section 3 deals with the agri-food scheduling problem description. In Section 4, the proposed GA and ACO to solve dynamic scheduling of perishable products in Agri-Food industry is detailed. The experimental results are developed in Section 5. Finally, the conclusions and some perspectives works are given in the last section.