Application of hierarchical production planning in a multiproduct, multimachine environment

The paper proposes a model designed to deal with a hierarchical production planning/scheduling problem in a multiproduct, multimachine environment with sequence dependent set-ups. Problems of this type have been known to be difficult to solve owing to their heavy computational burden. The model proposed here incorporates the concept of expected set-up costs and the expertise of manager input at the aggregate planning level in order significantly to reduce the computational burden. When tested with the actual plant data, the model outperformed other models reported in the literature.