MICROPLANO – A decision support system for production planning in the plastic industry

In this paper we introduce a production-scheduling problem in a Portuguese small medium enterprise (SME) that produces small plastic parts for the electric/electronic industry. The parts are obtained by plastic injection onto a mould, in a shop composed by 32 parallel machines. The characteristics of the production system are presented and a two-step algorithm, chosen to schedule all the jobs, is described. This algorithm, based in two known heuristics, has been incorporated in a decision support system (Microplano), which also contains a database management module and a user interface module. Microplano has been implemented in the factory and is in use on a regular basis.