production planning and operations scheduling: a new approach

this paper introduces the general framework of a new system for material flow planning and operations and some of its important aspects. the justification for the new system stems from the short coming of mrp  i/mrp ii in term of its assumptions, particularly in relation to fixed lead times and effectively infinite production capacity. at the heart of the system is an automatic scheduler based on a heuristic in which the planned lead times are established by determining the relationship between the capacity and the load pattern resulting from a particular product mix at any given time. to appraise the approach, a direct comparison is with a schedule using fixed lead time (as in mrp) based on the same performance measures. experimentation results demonstrate the improvements made by the new approach