Collaborative production planning with production time windows and order splitting in make-to-order manufacturing

•A generalized production planning problem is studied.•An efficient particle swarm optimization-based heuristic is proposed.•Several managerial insights are reported. In this paper, we study a generalized production planning problem, that simultaneously investigates the two decisions that play critical roles in most firms, namely, production planning and order splitting and assignment. The problem takes into consideration the production time windows and capacities. We formulate the integrated problem as a linear mixed-integer program with a minimized total cost. A particle swarm optimization-based approach is developed to address the problem. Extensive computational experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms a commercial optimization package. Some managerial insights are also explored and reported. Finally, concluding remarks and future research directions are provided.