Planning horizons for the production smoothing problem: a heuristic search procedure

Abstract An optimal or proper planning horizon is essential to the effectiveness of planning activity. In this paper, we point out some limitations of the existing studies and develop a heuristic search algorithm for finding a planning horizon for a production smoothing problem. This direct search algorithm is simple and straightforward, and hence, is readily understandable by practitioners. An experimental study is also conducted for performance evaluation. The results show that heuristic search procedure outperforms the K-M algorithm in the sense that a search heuristic can find the planning horizons for various types of demand patterns efficiently, if the planning horizons do exist.