Planning and Scheduling System for Make-To-Order Production

A system for the planning of make-to-order production in the mechanical engineering industry is described. In the present system, a multiple-phase heuristic procedure is used to schedule the orders. Various objectives are used; amongst others are resource profile peak minimization and the minimization of the sum of the squares of the total resource usages during each time period and over all resources. The activity intensities are taken to be variable and are adjusted in order to achieve smooth resource profiles. The performance of the system is found to be good with respect to large practical problems.