Integrating production activity control into a hierarchical production-planning model

Presents a hierarchical production planning (HPP) model that integrates aggregate-type planning, family disaggregate planning, lot-sizing, job scheduling and evaluation of the final production plans into a complete planning and scheduling system. Incorporation of a simple heuristic scheduling algorithm into the HPP model is the primary contribution. The scheduling routine schedules the jobs based on just-in-time concept and provides detailed shopfloor information such as job tardiness, bottleneck work centres, capacity level, inventory or shortage level and number of set-ups. This information is critical for effective shopfloor management. Experimental results indicate that the performance of the present model is better than the existing models in general. However, the model is truly superior under tight capacity conditions.