A MODELLING TECHNIQUE FOR PRODUCTION PLANNING

The purpose of a production plan is to help elaborating and combining decisions on a mean-term or a long-term basis. This objective explains why planning problems can only be solved for models generally obtained by aggregation and simplification. In the framework of an integrated decision structure, a production plan needs to be refined and specified through a detailed scheduling of operations on the various machines. The production planning model presented in this paper is a discrete-time input-output model. It allows the use of optimal control methods. There is a correspondence between this model and the queueing network model describing the manufacturing system. This correspondence provides a direct interpretation of the decision variables of the planning problem as the reference values for the real-time release of processing orders.