Towards a new planning and scheduling approach for multistage production systems

Some specific industries (electronic equipment, armament, aeronautics) suffer from long and uncertain production lead times. Classical planning and scheduling tools are implemented in these industries but there is a lack of theory about how to coordinate them. In this paper, we study the interaction between planning and scheduling stages in a hierarchical production planning system. We show that significant lead time performances improvements result from a specific combination between MRP, PERT and some dynamic priority rule. These results are based on a simulation model integrating planning strategies as well as multi-level shop floor control.