A service-level-oriented heuristic approach to production planning in a robotized spinning-mill

SUMMARY

This paper presents a heuristic approach to production planning and inventory control. The heuristic was developed for scheduling the production of N-products on many machines when both production and demand rates are stochastic. The key for scheduling production is a target inventory level to be maintained at the beginning of each period; hysteresis factors within the heuristic make the production plan more or less sensitive to transient conditions in both demand and production. Experimental results of its application in a production environment are provided.