Strategic Planning and Production Control: Deriving an Useful Master Production Schedule from Sales Forecasts

摘要

The Master Production Schedule (MPS) is the linkrnbetween the strategic plan and the operativernproduction plan. Indeed, several authors claim thatrnMPS is one of the most important input for MRPrnmodule and detailed scheduling. In this paper thernauthors propose a rolling horizon MPS model forrnproduction systems with multiple production lines inrnpresence of multiple objective functions and minimumrnbatch-sized production lot constraints.rnIn order to achieve long and medium termrnplanning in a flowshop production process, the authorsrndeveloped an MPS tactical planner, which schedulesrnjobs on a horizon varying from six to ten months,rnconsidering finite capacity constraints. The planningrnalgorithm is composed by two main procedures: thernfirst one chooses the best heuristic by the comparisonrnof twelve different heuristics by using production inputrnand stochastic sales forecasts; the second onernperforms the scheduling of the strategic productionrnplan by using the best heuristic previously selectedrnand deterministic inputs.rnAs a result the MPS is derived by using a selectedrnheuristic starting from a stochastic comparison, even ifrnthe final production plan is obtained troughrndeterministic input. For these reasons we are confidentrnthat the final MPS is both robust (stochastic validation)rnand realistic (based on a finite capacity planning).