Invited Speakers

Manufacturing rough plans and detailed schedules must establish a compromise between antagonistic optimization criteria: meet as much as possible of the established and expected customer demand; deliver customer demands on time; reduce production costs (processing costs, resource usage costs, setup costs, cleaning costs); keep little value in inventories without risking starvation, and so on. Usual practice is often very unsatisfactory in this respect. For example, rough plans are often built by averaging setup times and costs, even when variations are significant; production batch sizes are determined by economic considerations, with no respect to the distribution of demand due dates; detailed schedules are built and maintained under fixed resource availability and production order to demand pegging assumptions. In many cases, globally suboptimal results are obtained because at some step in the process, an important optimization criterion and associated constraints have been ignored.