Disassembly Scheduling for the Meat Processing Industry with Product Perishability

Abstract

The pork processing industry resembles a case of disassembly scheduling because a planner needs to decide the pig size and quantity to be supplied to the slaughtering house, as well as the amount of meat and meat size needed to process an order. The meat processing resembles disassembly scheduling for multiple products with parts in commonality. We extend the general disassembly model further to cover product perishability of the meat while allowing demand to occur in other levels of product hierarchy rather than the leaf product (products that are no longer being disassembled). We also allow the model to obtain outsource products to be processed if it achieves a more economical solution. In this study, we developed a mathematical model to determine the quantity and size of pig supplies (root items) and meat cuts (parent/child items) to be processed for an order to minimize the total cost. Computation time and cost of generated test problems are obtained. The application of pork processing plan is demonstrated.