Multi-period aggregate production planning in a news-vendor framework

The paper focuses on the control decisions in the area of multi-period, aggregate production planning. The plan consists of a number of sequential planning periods stretching out to a particular time horizon. Owing to machine downtime, quality, supply, and maintenance problems, true productivity differs from the expected. Therefore, at the end of each planning period, the planner must have immediate feedback about production outcome. The results are analysed for variations from the plan (shortfalls or surpluses) and any differences are used to modify subsequent plans. The goal is to minimize the expected total costs including productivity, overtime as well as over- and under-production costs. Although the presented solution is generally not of base-stock type, a correspondence between it and the solution of the classical newsboy problem is revealed. This paper was developed during a consultation assignment in the food industry where the planning results were tested, and the case is presented.