Aggregate production planning for a continuous reconfigurable manufacturing process

Most of the research on aggregate production planning has been focused on discrete parts manufacturing models. In environments where intermediate inventory cannot be stored, and multiple products are produced simultaneously using complex configurations of production machines, these models may produce erroneous results. In this paper, we present a configuration-based formulation for one such manufacturing environment, where production may involve dissimilar machines performing similar operations at different rates and equipment can be connected together to form different production lines. The production process is continuous and no in-process inventory can be kept. We present and compare several heuristics to generate input data to solve the aggregate production-planning problems using the configuration-based formulation. Computational experiments show that large-scale real-world problems we encountered can be solved in reasonable time using our heuristics and commercial optimization software like CPLEX.