Combination of planning methods in a comprehensive production planning approach for sequenced production lines

Medium-term sales and operations as well as medium to short-term production planning in customer order driven production processes are performed using a cascading planning process. A lack of coordination and feedback between different planning phases causes problems with a negative effect on costs in production that originate from unfeasible production programs. Based on a system for the classification of planning restrictions the planning process will be controlled utilizing a newly developed combination of the methods of Linear Programming and Constraint Programming. The result is a formal logic to combine the different planning horizons and the two sets of planning methods. (C) 2012 CIRP.