Order release planning by iterative simulation and linear programming: Theoretical foundation and analysis of its shortcomings

摘要

Planning future order releases for complex manufacturing systems with substantial lead times must consider limited capacities and the resulting production smoothing problem as well as the highly nonlinear relationship between capacity utilization, work-in-process and flow times. An important solution approach that has been proposed for this problem is to iterate between an order release model with fixed lead times and a lead time estimation (usually simulation) model that estimates the flow times for given order releases, providing the lead times for the next iteration. However, the convergence of this iterative procedure is highly unpredictable, limiting its practical use.