Medium Term Production Management for Cyclic Deliveries

The growing quality and delay requirements have catalyzed the emergence of new commercial paradigms, which have strongly modified the customer–supplier relationship. Customers and suppliers become more and more linked with contracts or global orders spanned over a relatively important period. This paper, examines a type of contract which specifies a fixed and cyclic delivery dates with delivery quantities varying between a min and a max values. The exact delivery quantities are usually known only few days before the delivery. A company which produces n items on a bottleneck facility is considered; each item is confronted to a cyclic demand and has an important holding cost in comparison to set‐up costs. We propose heuristic approaches, to build, in a medium term level, cyclic production schedules. These schedules face the demand and minimize a total cost function composed of holding and set‐up costs. An experiment is proposed in order to prove the effectiveness of our approaches.