A Multi-Objective Approach for Production Smoothing Problem

When there are lots of variations in demand level, production plans obtained from most of the existing methods suggest some roduction fluctuations over some of planning periods. On the other hand, managers want to smooth the production plan over different planning periods because of corresponding costs. So this paper presents a novel multi-objective model for determining the most favorite production plan that smoothes the variations of batch sizes and minimizes the total cost of the production plan simultaneously. For multi-objectiveness of the model, and its special characteristics we develop a heuristic solution method to generate a number of Pareto-optimal solutions efficiently. Finally, the results of a real case study are reported.

Keywords:

multi-objective model , production leveling , batch sizes , Pareto-optimal solution