Fuzzy Aggregate Production Planning with Flexible Requirement Profile for Plan Stability in Uncertain Environments

Abstract

In this paper, a production plan stability control technique called flexible requirement profile (FRP) is combined with fuzzy aggregate production planning (APP) to not only handle the planning system uncertainties, but also to maintain the stability of the production plans when re-planning. More specifically, this paper proposes two new fuzzy aggregate planning models namely the fuzzy Max-Min FRP-APP and fuzzy ranking FRP-APP. The proposed models are tested on five industry-based cases and the results are compared to the crisp FRP-APP, and traditional fuzzy APP models with no stability considerations. The results indicate that the proposed fuzzy FRP-APP model is able to yield comparable stability and cost performance as the crisp FRP-APP model but produce noticeably more stable production plans compared to the non-FRP-APP models without significantly sacrificing the cost. [Received: 30 June 2019; Accepted: 12 August 2020]