Medium Term Production Management for Cyclic Deliveries

Abstract

The growing quality and delay requirements have catalyzed the emergence of new commercial paradigms, which have strongly modified the customer---supplier relationship. Customers and suppliers become more and more linked with contracts or global orders spanned over a relatively important period. This paper, examines a type of contract which specifies a fixed and cyclic delivery dates with delivery quantities varying between a min and a max values. The exact delivery quantities are usually known only few days before the delivery. A company which produces n items on a bottleneck facility is considered; each item is confronted to a cyclic demand and has an important holding cost in comparison to set-up costs. We propose heuristic approaches, to build, in a medium term level, cyclic production schedules. These schedules face the demand and minimize a total cost function composed of holding and set-up costs. An experiment is proposed in order to prove the effectiveness of our approaches.