SIMULATION-BASED ENVIRONMENT FOR MULTI-ECHELON CYCLIC PLANNING AND OPTIMISATION

The paper focuses on the development of simulationbased environment for multi-echelon cyclic planning and optimisation at the product maturity phase. It is based on integration of analytical and simulation techniques. Analytical techniques are used to obtain initial planning decisions under conditions of stochastic demand and lead time. Simulation techniques extend these conditions to backlogging and capacity constraints. Simulation-based optimization is used to analyse and improve cyclical decisions received from the analytical model. Simulation environment is built in the ProModel simulation software. Automatic generation of simulation model is provided by using the ProModel ActiveX technology and VBA programming language. An example of multi-echelon cyclic planning and optimisation using this environment is given.