Extended model for a hybrid production planning approach

The traditional production planning model based upon the famous linear programming formulation has been well known in the literature. However, the capacity constraints in such a model may not correctly represent the actual situations of the shop floor, as pointed out by Byrne and Bakir. A hybrid approach was proposed by them, applying simulation and a linear programming model iteratively, to find the capacity-feasible production plan. This paper proposes an extended linear programming model for a similar hybrid approach. At each simulation run, the actual workload of the jobs and the utilization of the resources are identified. The information is then passed to the linear programming model for calculating the optimal production plan with minimum total costs. Through the case study, it is shown that the proposed approach finds the better solution in a less number of iterations compared to the approach by Byrne and Bakir.