OBTAINING REALISTIC PRODUCTION PLANS FOR A BATCH-PRODUCTION FACILITY

With many industries changing to a just-in-time manufacturing environm ent, the ability to reliably meet due dates and/or determine delivery/ promise dates is gaining importance. In order to achieve this, the abi lity to obtain realistic production plans is paramount. For these plan s to be reliable, uncertainty needs to be incorporated. These uncertai nties include, but are not limited to, processing time uncertainties, equipment reliability/availability, process yields, demands, and manpo wer fluctuations. In this paper we present a framework for including u ncertainty by means of Monte Carlo sampling. This framework is not lim ited to a specific model, but results obtained show that the need of i ncluding sufficient detail is best satisfied by a scheduling model. A number of stopping criteria are derived and the framework utilized to obtain operating policies for an industrially based example.