Analysis of production planning in case of the random demand

The production planning (PP) becomes a difficult problem face to complexity and uncertainty of the actual environment. As the variation of demand were difficult to predict, the management of uncertainty imposes different form s of actions by the side of the firm. By using classical methods of PP, the firm can adopt two extreme attitudes confronted to a demand having seasona l variations. The first consists to assume regular production, which has fo r counterpart the stocks generations. The second is to adapt in permanence its resources and capacities to answer to client expectations, therefore to perfect its reactivity to demand. Both of them having their own advantages and limits, the adopted solution will be a compromise between the resource s flexibility and inventories constitution Our work consists on the behavio ural analyses of the classical methods with respect to different seasonal d emands with random variations, by using the simulations. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.