DEA-based production planning considering production stability

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how to stably arrange the total input resources and output productions when the total outputs can be forecasted in a centralized decision-making environment based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). It usually involves the participation of all individual decision-making units, each contributing in part to the total production. Two stability indexes are defined to assess the stability of production planning, i.e. scale stability, efficiency and technology stability. Then, we propose a DEA-based model to derive the next period production planning. Finally, we illustrate the proposed approach and compare the results between two existing studies and this paper by using three numerical examples. The results show that the proposed production planning in this paper is stabler than existing studies. It implies that the production planning in this paper would be more practicable for real production.

Keywords:

• Data envelopment analysis (DEA)
• decision-making units (DMUs)
• production planning
• centralized decision-making
• production stability

Acknowledgments

The authors thank an associate editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The authors are grateful to Professor Joe Zhu for his suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71471053, 71601064, 71828101, 71871081), Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (No. 1708085QG161), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. JZ2017HGTB0184).