Stochastic programming in production planning: a case with none-simple recourse

In modeling real world planning problems as optimization programs the assumption that all parameters are known with certainty is often more seriously violated than the assumption that the objective function and the constraints can be approximated sufficiently accurate by lineair functions. In this paper we discuss the concrete application of stochastic programming to a multiperiod production planning problem in which the demand for the products during the various periods is assumed stochastic with known probability distribution. Since the resulting stochastic program does not possess the property of “simple” recourse no direct use can be made of existing methods that have been proposed in literature for solving problems of this type.