Modeling aggregate production planning problems as linear programs

Abstract

Aggregate production planning (APP) seeks to determine production levels for a company's product families over a 12 to 18-month planning horizon. However, the coverage of methods available to create feasible, low-cost aggregate production plans in many  production and operations management textbooks does not begin to capture the complexity o f aggregate production planning, especially its multiperiod, multiproduct environment. M ore sophisticated solution procedures such as linear programming receive l ittle or no coverage a t all. This paper w ill explain how to model different APP environments using linear programming. Examples of  each environment are included.