Planning stability in material requirements planning systems (Q5960177)

This book deals with material requirements planning which aims at developing a detailed production and procurement schedule. To this end the amount of all materials which are necessary to produce a certain quantity of end-products within a given planning horizon and the timing of the matching production and procurement decisions have to be predicted. The difficulty to cope with is the uncertainty of future developments. Plans which need only small revisions and called stable. After introducing the technical terminology, concepts for measuring planning stability are developed. Subsequently, a stationary inventory control rule with periodic review within a rolling horizon planning framework for a single-stage production system is analyzed. For illustration the random demand is modelled by a Mixed-Erlang, an exponential and a hyper-exponential distribution. These distribution functions allow to derive analytically some properties of the stability functions. Finally, a product recovery system, also called ``reverse logistics'' is investigated. A product recovery system deals with the management of all used and discarded products, components and materials for which a producing company is legally, contractually, or otherwise responsible. Recovery systems without and with disposal option are treated. The random demands and returns are modelled by exponential distributions by means of which the stability function remains tractable. A summary and an annex containing formulas and proofs conclude the book.