Multi-site planning and scheduling

Faced with international openness markets, lots of firms have split their production systems to be more close to customers. They have to manage several production units which have to supply demands at the lower costs. A two-level production management approach is proposed to control such multi-site production systems. It is organised around a global multi-site production planning and local multi-workshop scheduling. The multi-site capacity-constrained production planning problem is modelled as a transhipment problem and a primal–dual heuristic is proposed to solve it. The local multi-workshop scheduling problem leads to a job-shop with duplicated machine problem and a heuristic based on model reductions has been developed to face it.