GENERATING DAILY PRODUCTION SCHEDULES IN-PROCESS INDUSTRIES

We study the problem of generating daily production schedules in a two -stage production system that is typical of many processing industries . We first describe the problem as it occurs in practice, and then pre sent an integer programming model that maximizes a weighted sum of the customer orders to be processed in a day's work when a priori product ion sequences are specified at some stations. Bounds on the optimal so lution are obtained by a lagrangian relaxation, and two heuristic proc edures are developed and tested empirically. We show how these procedu res can be incorporated in an interactive solution scheme to generate good production schedules.