Modelling of flexibility costs in a decision support system for mid-term capacity planning

Nowadays manufacturing companies are coerced to become more flexible to adapt their internal processes quickly and economically to the volatile external situations. In this paper, we develop a cost model with respect to the capacity envelope concept. Generic flexibility measures are used and described by numerous influence factors and constraints. Furthermore, the cost model will be demonstrated as a mixed-integer linear model and is finally integrated in a decision support system for mid-term production planning. The resulting problem can be solved with commonly available standard solvers. Finally, we will show numerical results from practice.