A fuzzy logic-based approach in capacity-planning problems

In capacity-planning systems, various sources of uncertainty and imprecision are encountered. In most cases, the uncertainty is determined by the subjective beliefs of managers linguistically. However, the measurement of mangers' judgments is difficult and vague. Therefore, a fuzzy logic-based approach is proposed to deal with capacity-planning problems in the presence of the uncertain demand, set-up resources, and the capacity constraints. Firstly, fuzzy numbers are used to represent uncertain data. Secondly, fuzzy if-then rules are employed to model vaguely defined relations between fuzzy numbers. Then, the computational aspects of fuzzy models and interpretations of inference results are illustrated by a numerical case. Finally, three examples are used to verify the proposed representation and inference mechanism.