Production planning and scheduling in the context of cyclic delivery schedules

This paper considers a factory which produces n items on a single facility and which is confronted by a cyclic demand: each item is ordered relatively to a cyclic delivery schedule with a mean quantity for each delivery. This kind of ‘contract-order’ is found very frequently, especially in the big distribution and the automotive sectors. So, the long-term information becomes the due date and the exact quantity that will be delivered is only known in the short term. This work aims at defining a new production management model and especially determining cyclic production schedules in this context. The proposed approaches are based on generating, evaluating and selecting the best production sequences and phases.