A production planning expert system in manufacturing

Production planning is very important in a firm. It provides key communication links from top management to manufacturing. Meanwhile, it determines the basis for focusing the detailed production resources to achieve the strategic objectives of the firm. For most firms in China, production planning consists of yearly and monthly production plans. In fact, the implementation of yearly production planning means the determination of a product composition that is a product arrangement for one year at specific conditions. In general, it an be solved by using an LP model. However, the main task of monthly production planning is the product distribution problem. Of course, one can consider a quantitative model (for example, a combinatorial optimization model) to get solution. But, the authors realized that the solution is very complicated and very difficult to solve. So, they considered an integrated expert system approach. In this way, they developed and implemented an integrated production planning system which combines the LP model with the expert system approach. The system has implemented in a chemical plant in China