A Goal Programming model for Aggregate Production Planning problem

Aggregate Production Planning (APP) involves the simultaneous determination of company's production, inventory and employment levels over a finite time horizon to minimise the total costs while meeting the forecasted demand. Other objectives can be to minimise the fluctuation on the employment levels, the inventory levels or to reach some standard on the performance levels. The objective of this paper is to propose an effective method to elaborate an aggregate plan which takes into account the manager's preferences. We propose a Goal Programming (GP) approach, with satisfaction functions. This latter has not been used in the field of APP. Applied to a real case problem, weighted GP has initially been used; the results were not satisfactory for the manager. Our GP with satisfaction function gives, very satisfactory results for the manager.