An Efficient Multi-Objective Hybrid Simheuristic Approach for Advanced Rolling Horizon Production Planning

This contribution introduces an innovative holistic multi-objective simheuristic approach for advanced production planning on rolling horizon basis for an European industrial food manufacturer. The optimization combines an efficient heuristic mixed-integer optimization, followed by a customized Simulated Annealing algorithm. State-of-the-Art multi-objective solution techniques fail to address highly fluctuating demands in a suitable way. Due to the lack of modelling details, as well as dynamic constraints, these methods are unable to adapt to seasonal (off-) peaks in demand and to consider resource adjustments. Our approach features dynamic capacity and stock-level restrictions, which are evaluated by an integrated simulation module, as well as a statistical explorative data analysis. In addition to a smoothed production, mid-term stock levels, setup-costs and the expected utilization of downstream equipment are optimized simultaneously. The results show a ~30 to 40% reduced output variation rate, thus yielding an equally reduced requirement for downstream equipment.