Long and medium-term production planning are tools to match production orders and resources capability but can also be used as baseline for material procurement. In some systems, however, to reduce the complexity of the planning problem, distinct production operations are aggregated into activities which normally represent production phases. This is the case of some Manufacturing-to-Order and Engineering-to-Order Systems. The lack of a detailed schedule of the manufacturing operations can cause difficulties in providing a proper Material Requirements Planning and can affect the feasibility of the production plan. The paper proposes an approach to extract scheduling information from a production plan, grounding on the knowledge of the production process, to support material procurement. Once a criterion to aggregate operations is chosen and the plan devised, the description of production operations and their precedence relations are used to obtain temporal ranges for production operations and, hence, deadline ranges are provided for the MRP. The proposed approach is applied to an industrial environment producing machining centers.
Comparing stochastic optimization methods to solve the medium-term operation planning problem
