Aggregate production planning-A survey of models and methodologies

Aggregate production planning (APP) involves the simultaneous determination of company’s production, inventory and employment levels over a finite time horizon. Its objective is to minimize the total relevant costs while meeting non-constant, time varying demand, assuming fixed sales and production capacity. Despite numerous and varied solution techniques few have been implemented in industry. One problem with their implementation could be that little literature exists, outside of cursory textbook presentations and state-of-the-art summaries in 1967 and 1972 by Silver, which specifically summarizes the existing APP techniques into a simple classification scheme. In this paper the authors present a classification scheme that categorizes the literature on APP since early 1950, summarizing the various existing techniques into a framework depending upon their ability to either produce an exact optimal or near-optimal solution. The research literature that they compiled consisted of 140 journal articles and 14 books. The articles came from 17 different journals. It is intended to facilitate practitioners and researchers in finding the source work for existing methodologies, and to assist them in determining the suitability for implementation to their particular manufacturing problem and also to identify those areas that might require additional investigation and research.