Multiple criteria decision support system for production management

A microcomputer-based decision support system (DSS) is developed to help the managers of medium-scale firms make decisions when faced with rapidly changing market conditions and to strengthen their production management problem-solving abilities. The system, designed for production management, includes three basic units: (i) the database, an information resource; (ii) the model base, a solution technique; and (iii) the interactive dialogue, a decision making procedure. The database subsystem integrates the advantages of using a structure database to convert manual operations to computerized operations and provides up-to-date information. The model base subsystem is designed to minimize the inventory cost by considering two objectives. A heuristic procedure is also introduced to solve the large scale bicriterion integer programming model when used in a real production environment. The man-machine interactive dialogue is designed to allow communication with the system in an easily learned and approachable manner. The entire DSS is based on the practical operations of a medium-scale export commodity producer.