SETTING PLANNED LEADTIMES IN CAPACITY REQUIREMENTS PLANNING

This paper deals with the problem of determining planned leadtimes in a periodic loading system, such as 'Material Requirements Planning.' A method for determining planned leadtime for an individual job, based upon the operation time for the job, is presented from the standpoint that the planned leadtime should be determined under a management poli cy, taking a trade off between work-in-process quantities and capacity requirements variations into consideration. The proposed method, whic h is derived with Lagrange's method of indeterminate coefficients, can minimize capacity requirements variations under a given average loadi ng time, under general operation time distributions.