Modelling of ill-known requirements and integration in production planning

Abstract

Making decisions on the basis of uncertain forecasts is one of the key challenges for efficient supply chain management. This article suggests the use of the theory of possibility for building a procurement plan on the basis of ill-known requirements. These requirements, expressed in quantities by date, may come from various sources: forecasts or orders for instance. The possible types of imperfection pervading requirement are analysed, and a unified representation model is suggested. A method is then described for calculating a plausible demand per period without loss of information; it is illustrated with an example in the last section.

Keywords:

• requirement
• demand
• imprecision
• uncertainty
• theory of possibility

Acknowledgements

This study has been performed with the support of Région Midi-Pyrénées and of the University of Toulouse.