Author(s)

Jie Zang, Jiafu Tang

.

Joint decisions in production allocation and ordering policies for single and multiple products in a production-distribution network system consisting of multiple plants are discussed, production capacity constraints of multi-plants and unit production capacity for producing a product are considered. Based on the average total cost in unit time, the decisive model is established. It tries to determine the production cycle length, delivery frequency in a cycle from the warehouse to the retailer and the economic production allocation. The approach hinges on providing an optimized solution to the joint decision model through the heuristics methods. The heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the single-product joint decision model and the multi-products decision problem. Simulations on different sizes of problems have shown that the heuristics is effective, and in general more effective than Quasi-Newton method (QNM).

Joint Decisions, Production-Distribution; Multiple Plants, Capacitated, Heuristic Algorithm

J. Zang and J. Tang, "Heuristics for Production Allocation and Ordering Policies in Multi-Plants with Capacity," Journal of Service Science and Management, Vol. 3 No. 1, 2010, pp. 16-22. doi: 10.4236/jssm.2010.31002.