Multi-site planning: A transshipment problem

Today, firms have to compete on international openness markets. The resulting production organisation is a multi-site production system. Several production units called sites have to supply irregular demands at the lower costs. We propose a two-level production management approach to control such systems. It results in a global multi-site production planning and in local multi-workshop scheduling. This paper focuses on the multi-site production planning problem. A primal–dual approach is proposed to solve this problem. It allows us to minimise variable and fixed costs. This heuristic has been experimented on a wide range of problem test data.