Production planning and control systems including load-oriented order release-Problems and research perspectives

In the last fifteen years order release has been increasingly recognized as a very important decision problem in production planning and control. In German-speaking countries, especially load-oriented order release (the authors use the acronym BORA from the German) has been discussed with great interest, both in theory and practice. In this paper it is shown that the performance of BORA depends on the parameter setting, and the optimal parameter setting of BORA depends on the capacity load. The authors develop two LP models for rough-cut capacity planning which can be used to adjust dynamically the parameters of BORA to the capacity load. Simulation results show improvements compared to a BORa application using ‘standard’ parameter values.