About tooling capacity for the vulcanising planning decision problem to improve strategic business profit

Abstract

Original equipment manufacturers (among others) from several industries experience the vulcanising planning decision problem (VPDP) on a periodical basis. VPDP assumes tooling capacity (number of tools per part-number) as input data, but when these companies face the possibility of manufacturing a new family of part-numbers satisfying VPDP conditions tooling capacity has to be determined. Tooling costs per part number are significant: design, capacity, maintenance and salvage value. Strategic business profit is impacted since these contracts tend to have a life time that includes several years. The contribution of this work is fourfold: the definition of the tooling capacity problem (TCP) for VPDP, the development of part-number wise lower bounds on tooling capacity, a heuristic (along with an upper bound on optimality gap) to find tooling capacity values and preliminary results on sensitivity analysis over contract demand changes. Numerical experimentation demonstrates the efficiency of the heuristic.

Keywords:

• cutting stock problems
• heuristics
• make-to-order production
• rubber curved hoses
• tooling capacity
• vulcanising planning decision problem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.