A Study of a Heuristic Capacity Planning Algorithm for Weapon Production System

This research developed a capacity planning heuristic for a weapon production system (WPS) with characteristics of low order volume, high order variety, complex processes, uncertain order and frequent changes of orders. The heuristic capacity planning algorithm allocates orders to resources, determines appropriate order release time to the factory, and estimates the expected loading of all machines. With these, plant managers can take actions to manage capacity shortage of bottleneck machines and make necessary change of order planning. The proposed algorithm was programmed in Microsoft Visual Basic, and real data from a weapon production factory were used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this algorithm. Comparing the performance of results, it reveals that the proposed capacity planning heuristics outperforms current manual capacity planning policy used in practice.