Production planning architectures: a common framework for the comparison of MRP II OPT, JIT

The possibility of integrating two or more of three methods for planning production schedulers, namely, MRP II (product-structure-based), OPT (process-structure-based), and JIT (product-delivery-dependent), is discussed. It has been verified that each method has merits and defects, and that, from this point of view, the three show complementarity. It is suggested that such integration is possible only if a well-assessed mathematical formulation can be stated and used for modeling all three methods in terms of alternative approximate solutions of the same optimization problem. Such a mathematical formulation is outlined