Hierarchical production planning: Comparison of some heuristics

Abstract This paper presents a hierarchical production planning approach as a distinct alternative to the monolithic approach by highlighting the detailed attributes of each approach in both philosophical and functional terms. A hierarchical approach interlinks the various decision making levels in an organization and the solutions are obtained for each level depending upon the characteristics of the decision problem at that level. An attempt is made here to study some heuristic approaches and apply them to a real-life problem situation. It is seen that the proposed heuristic approach performs better than some other available heuristics when the minimization of the number of backorders is considered to be a dominant objective.