A framework for a make-to-order scheduling problem with sequence-dependent set up times and product perishability: a case study in the food industry

Over the years, production planning problems have widely studied in the literature both for their multiple applications and to adapt them to the development of new technologies. Nowadays, globalization requires companies to achieve high levels of production efficiency in order to compete advantageously on both domestic and international markets. In this paper, we consider an Italian company operating in the food sector, which produces multiple products and some of them are highly perishable. The production is usually planned using a short-term view, the production line can be re-equipped according to the product to be manufactured and set-up times are sequence-dependent. The limited production capacity of the industrial plant and some organizational inefficiencies determine significant effects on customer orders, which are often rejected. The contribution concerns a mathematical framework to support the scheduling of the production activities at operational level. In fact, the limited company budget does not allow strategic investments. The developed decision-making approach acquires a set of customer orders as input and outputs a production plan which mainly answers the following questions: what to produce, how much to produce and in what period of time to produce, in order to maximize conflicting objectives. Starting from some theoretical assumptions, our approach is validated using real data. The results show an overall improvement in three key performance indicators, appropriately defined.