Cooperative aggregate production planning: A game theory approach

Production costs in general, and workforce and inventory costs in particular, constitute a large fraction of the operating costs of many manufacturing plants. We introduce cooperative aggregate production planning as a way to decrease these costs. That is, when production planning of two or more facilities (plants) is integrated, they can interchange workforce and products inventory; thus, their product demands can be satisfied at lower cost. This paper quantifies the cost saving and synergy of different coalitions of production plants by a new linear model for cooperative aggregate planning problem. The developed approach is explicated with a numerical example in which inventory and workforce levels of different coalitions of facilities are evaluated. Afterward, a key question would be how the cost saving of a coalition should be divided among members. We tackle the problem using different methods of cooperative game theory. These methods are implemented in the numerical example to gain an insight into properties of the corresponding game results.