Mid-term Multisite Production Planning: a new approach to manage demand uncertainty

摘要

This paper is aimed at deepening the topic of mid-term production planning in a Multisite Production Network (MPN) in case of uncertain demand. In this regard, the first part of the paper is devoted to a present a review of related literature, with the purpose of highlighting how practitioners' and scholars' approaches to multisite stochastic planning can be matched together: this will be done by introducing a three layer planning framework, which will clarify the structure of this planning task. Then, in the second part of the paper, we will introduce a new criterion to deal with the first of these three layers. This new criterion, which is designed to isolated demand uncertainty within each product's demand, is put at work with a very simple configuration for the remaining two layers, and it is compared to a more traditional uncertainty management approach. A simulation study is performed and discussed, whose convincing results confirm the validity of the overall research framework, as well as of the proposed uncertainty management principle.