Tactical Planning in Flexible Production Networks in the Automotive Industry

Today)s automotive markets are characterized by high demand volatility. As a consequence, flexibility to re-allocate production volume within the production networks is required, to match the production capacity for specific models with market demand. The sustained re-allocation of models to production lines to adjust to market demand is no longer a vision, but virtually industry standard. Hence, model plant allocation decisions are no longer a one time long term decision but a more frequent mid term planning task, for which current strategic decision support models are inadequate. Modified planning models are required to handle the increased flexibility. A modeling framework will be presented.