A fuzzy AHP–GP approach for integrated production-planning considering manufacturing partners

Most manufacturing companies cooperate with manufacturing partners in order to have flexible usable capacities to meet variable customer demand. In this environment, evaluations of manufacturing partners and integrated production-planning have become a critical issue. For integrated production-planning for all local manufacturing sites and manufacturing partners, the company should first evaluate the manufacturing partner, and then should decide how to allocate the production quota among internal facilities and manufacturing partners. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP)–goal programming (GP) approach to solve this integrated production-planning problem. The fuzzy AHP is utilized to determine relative weights of manufacturing partners, while the GP is used to formulate the integrated production-planning problem. The proposed approach is illustrated by an example adopted from a TFT-LCD manufacturing firm.