Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research will focus on modeling and solving integrated production planning problems. In production planning problems, one has to determine the timing and level of production to satisfy a specific demand over time. These production planning models can be extended to incorporate further operational and scheduling aspects or can be integrated with other planning problems upstream or downstream in the supply chain, e.g. the routing decisions for the distribution planning. Such integrated models will lead to globally more cost efficient solutions and a better use of the scarce resources compared to the situation where two linked processes are optimized separately. For these integrated production planning methods, we want to 1) obtain a better understanding of the problem and a good model representation; 2) develop optimization techniques to solve such integrated problems, and 3) generate insights into the cost effectiveness of these integrated models by comparing them to the outcomes of a hierarchical optimization approach.