Production planning and interval goal programming. Modelling feasibility

Abstract

Production Planning entails many decision making processes aimed at improving productivity and achieving the maximum profit from scarce resources. Assuming that there is a set of tasks to be carried out within a given time horizon, and each task can be performed in different ways depending on the resources used to develop it, the problem addressed in this work consists of determining how and when to carry out each task, in such a way that the tasks are scheduled in sequence at the minimum cost, taking into account any precedence relationships among them, the time window constraints for performing the tasks and the resources availability. This paper focuses on developing a scheduling model which avoids infeasibilities. To achieve this, a family of incompatibility conditions is introduced to avoid a certain type of simultaneous usage of resources, and interval goal programming is used to model time windows in a more flexible way. The model has been applied to agricultural production planning, showing the advantages of this approach.