On the short period production planning in industrial plants: A real case study

Due to the increased level of competition, nowadays production systems have to keep high performances ensuring customer satisfaction, cost-reduction and high product quality. The features of the actual competitive scenario drive to pursue even higher levels of efficiency in companies management. In this perspective production planning, with special regard to short period production planning, plays a key role. As a matter of fact, while the long period planning aims at the evaluation of production quantities for each product, the short period planning aims at the definition of an optimal schedule to achieve even higher system performances. As well known a scheduling problem encompasses a great complexity, this kind of problem can be seen as a double allocation problem where the allocation of the jobs to production resources and the allocation of the jobs in a specific time production horizon have to be defined. The complexity grows even further considering that many interacting and variables must be taken into account simultaneously and the stochastic system behaviour cannot be neglected. This paper faces scheduling problems in a real manufacturing system proposing an approach based on genetic algorithms, dispatching rules and Modelling & Simulation.