Title: A genetic algorithm approach to generate an integrated multiplant aggregate production-distribution plan

Authors: P. Ashoka Varthanan, N. Murugan, G. Mohan Kumar

Addresses: Mechanical Engineering Department, Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore – 641 008, Tamilnadu, India. ' Mechanical Engineering Department, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, Coimbatore – 641 014, Tamilnadu, India. ' Park College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore – 641 659, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: Industries adopting multisite manufacturing allocate their forecasted demand from various customers/demand centres to the respective plants based on gross production, inventory holding and distribution costs. But demand allocation (by considering the gross production cost) will not be appropriate, as production in each plant can be carried out through regular, overtime and outsourcing means. Also, this will lead to the allocation of the lion|s share of demand to a plant whose regular production cost is cheaper, but its overtime/outsourced production costs may be costlier than the regular production cost of other plants. In this paper, an aggregate production-distribution plan considering all the above-mentioned costs is developed for a renowned bearing manufacturing industry in India. The proposed Integer Nonlinear Programming (INLP) model is solved using a genetic algorithm and the results are compared with LINGO 8.0, a popular operations research software. The performance of the genetic algorithm is found to be superior to that of the LINGO 8.0 results.

Keywords: demand forecasting; aggregate production-distribution planning; genetic algorithms; integer nonlinear programming; INLP; operations research; multisite manufacturing; bearing manufacture; bearings; demand allocation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2010.033144

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2010 Vol.7 No.1, pp.76 - 96

Published online: 10 May 2010 *

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